I think this is the actual news: https://www.docker.com/docker-news-and-press/docker-extracts...

> Docker today announced that it is spinning out containerd, a core component of Docker Engine, its industry-leading container platform, and donating it to a new community project.

Press release linked to from: https://blog.docker.com/2016/12/containerd-core-runtime-comp...

Also containerd is going to have more stuff added - image management from the OCI image spec for example. Not a lot of stuff, but all the key runtime parts, see the Scope section for what is in and out.

yeah, this is key. It looks like JUST enough to be useful without the rest of the Docker engine.

containerd 0.2.4 which is used in Docker 1.12 covers only container execution. This announcement about containerd 1.0 roadmap extends the scope of containerd to make it a full container runtime designed to be embedded in higher level systems.

* scope table: https://github.com/docker/containerd#scope

* roadmap: https://github.com/docker/containerd/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

* new API: https://github.com/docker/containerd/tree/master/api