Installing and Configuring containerd as a Kubernetes Container Runtime
This post shows you how to install containerd as the container runtime in a Kubernetes cluster. I will also cover setting the cgroup driver for containerd to systemd, which is the preferred cgroup driver for Kubernetes.
In Kubernetes version 1.20 Docker was deprecated as a container runtime in a Kubernetes cluster and support was removed in 1.22. Kubernetes 1.26 requires that you use a runtime that conforms with the Container Runtime Interface (CRI). containerd is a CRI-compatible container runtime and is one of the supported options you have as a container runtime in this post-Docker/Kubernetes world. To be clear, you use container images created with Docker in containerd. containerd will start and run the container in your Kubernetes cluster. This post was previously published in February 2021. This is an updated version with the latest installation and configuration steps.