About the container runtime

Your clusters use a container runtime to create and run Kubernetes Pods and Google Distributed Cloud requires your container runtime to be containerd.

Note: In earlier versions of Google Distributed Cloud, you chose your container runtime, Docker or containerd, by specifying a value in the spec.nodeConfig.containerRuntime field in your cluster configuration file. This field is no longer included in cluster configuration files generated by bmctl and is ignored if it's added.

You must continue to install Docker on your admin workstation because bmctl requires Docker for operations, such as cluster creation. You can still use Docker to create images and build application containers. Those containers still work inside your cluster.

Check the status of the container runtime

To check the status of the container runtime, run the following command:

systemctl status containerd