Docker is one implementation of an open standard, not the standard itself. This closing chapter names the OCI specs that make your images portable, looks under the daemon at containerd and runc, surveys the daemonless and multi-host alternatives, draws the single-host boundary the whole book has held, and hands off to Kubernetes — then assembles every chapter into one production pipeline for Driftwood.
6 topics
Everything so far has been about making one container right on one machine. This chapter zooms out. The portability you have relied on since Chapter 2 — that the same image runs under Docker, Podman, containerd, and Kubernetes — is not a Docker feature; it is the Open Container Initiative standard, and naming it explains why "build once, run anywhere" was ever true. Under the docker command sit containerd and runc, the components Kubernetes talks to directly, and around Docker sit the daemonless and multi-host alternatives that read the identical OCI image.
The chapter ends where the book ends: the single-host line. Docker builds and runs containers on one host; Kubernetes orchestrates them across many. When Driftwood outgrows one machine, the job changes shape, and this course hands off to the sibling Kubernetes Deep Dive — which consumes, unchanged, the exact image this book taught you to build. The final topic walks that whole pipeline end to end as one workflow, so the separate lessons become a single path from source to a hardened running container.