We will show how users can enhance containerd without having to first modify containerd’s internals. We’ll also cover building custom snapshotters for special storage needs and integrating with custom runtimes for stronger isolation. Understanding containerd architecture and data flow is key to extending it’s functionality. In this talk, we’ll look at the internals of containerd (covering its components and dataflows) then dive into how external plugins work with containerd. We’ll go over using containerd’s smart client API and plugins to make new/custom integrations. We will demonstrate how various sandbox technologies can be integrated with containerd to work with Kubernetes, including Amazon’s Firecracker, Google’s gVisor etc. Attendees will leave the talk understanding how they can extend/modify containerd to support enhanced integrations for custom production deployments.