Ultimately I have two goals: 1. I’d like to align my local dev environment as much as possible with my cloud environment (i.e. cloud Kubernetes will be using containerd runtime with no shim) 2. Various tools my team is looking at using only seem to work with Docker and not with nerdctl What is the best way to accomplish this? Can I use “containerd” runtime setting in Rancher Desktop to get matching Kubernetes environment… and then install Docker Engine(?) outside of Rancher Desktop in order to use it rather than nerdctl?

The external “cri-dockerd” component is the replacement for the internal dockershim component. As long as that is running, you can still use dockerd.

To follow up: yes, RD uses cri-dockerd under the hood (so the dockershim deprecation/removal should be fine, as long as cri-dockerd keeps getting maintained). Unfortunately, we don't support simultaneously using containerd and dockerd at the same time (and it's unclear if that's going to be supportable, given that dockerd uses containerd under the hood).

I'm thinking that it might be easier to support nerdctld than cri-dockerd, in the long run. At least as long as copy/paste bugs keep popping up, from when Mirantis took the code from Kubernetes. Also depends on how long people will take to get off their

docker

habit, or when they can update their tools to support

nerdctl

instead.

That’s my biggest hangup right now with

nerdctl

. Would prefer to fully use it but so many tools I’ve tried to use support

docker

first and foremost. If the tool does support both then there are usually some missing features for

nerdctl

that don’t quite give it parity.

That sounds like

podman

Actually Skaffold and Tilt are the ones I’m thinking of haha

I meant as an “almost” version of docker… Think they are now working on compose next