Best of Containers — January 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of cloudflareCloudflare·16w

    Introducing Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

    Moltworker enables running Moltbot (an open-source AI personal assistant) on Cloudflare's infrastructure without dedicated hardware. Built using Cloudflare Workers, Sandbox SDK, Browser Rendering, and R2 storage, it demonstrates how the platform's improved Node.js compatibility and developer tools can host complex AI agents. The implementation includes AI Gateway integration for model management, Zero Trust Access for authentication, and persistent storage through R2. The proof-of-concept is open-sourced on GitHub, requiring only a $5/month Workers subscription to deploy.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of zedZed·20w

    Run Your Project in a Dev Container, in Zed — Zed's Blog

    Zed v0.218 introduces Dev Container support, allowing developers to work inside Docker-based development environments directly from the editor. Dev Containers solve environment inconsistency problems by defining infrastructure as code in a devcontainer.json file, eliminating manual setup and outdated documentation. Zed implements this by leveraging its existing remote development architecture, running a remote server inside the container that communicates with the local UI. Currently uses the devcontainer CLI reference implementation with plans to add custom Zed extensions, forwardPorts support, and built-in spec definition tools.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of grabGrab Tech Blog·18w

    Docker lazy loading at Grab: Accelerating container startup times

    Grab implemented Docker image lazy loading using SOCI (Seekable OCI) technology to solve slow container startup times caused by large images. The solution achieved 4x faster image pull times on fresh nodes, 30-40% faster P95 startup times in production, and 60% improvement in download times after configuration tuning. Unlike traditional image pulls that download all layers before starting, lazy loading uses remote snapshotters to fetch data on-demand via FUSE filesystems. Grab chose SOCI over eStargz because it's natively supported on Bottlerocket OS, doesn't require image conversion, and maintains the same application startup time as standard images while dramatically reducing image pull time.

  4. 4
    Video
    Avatar of codinggopherThe Coding Gopher·19w

    Docker just got some massive upgrades

    Docker released the Docker MCP toolkit, a production-grade implementation of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol that containerizes AI agent capabilities. The system uses three core components: a curated catalog of versioned MCP server images, a gateway that acts as a dynamic proxy managing container lifecycle and routing, and a toolkit for credential management and permissions. This architecture isolates agent tools in containers, providing reproducibility, security through policy enforcement, and composability by allowing multiple MCP servers to run side-by-side without dependency conflicts.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of phoronixPhoronix·17w

    Wasmer 7.0 Released For Advancing WebAssembly On The Desktop & Anywhere

    Wasmer 7.0 has been released, bringing updates to the WebAssembly runtime that enables lightweight containers to run across desktop, cloud, and edge environments. The release focuses on advancing WebAssembly's portability and execution capabilities across different platforms.

  6. 6
    Article
    Avatar of newstackThe New Stack·20w

    Bryan Cantrill: How Kubernetes Broke the AWS Cloud Monopoly

    Kubernetes broke AWS's cloud dominance by introducing a vendor-neutral orchestration layer that eliminated API lock-in. Before 2014, AWS seemed unbeatable with five times the capacity of competitors and relentless execution. Companies felt trapped by AWS APIs, believing competitors like Google Cloud and Azure could never catch up without API compatibility. Kubernetes changed this by allowing applications to be built against its APIs instead of cloud-specific ones, enabling true multi-cloud portability. Google open-sourced Kubernetes to encourage cloud neutrality, knowing they had the most to gain as the underdog. While AWS still leads with 30% market share, the cloud market has expanded into a trillion-dollar industry with diverse participants, partly thanks to Kubernetes democratizing infrastructure orchestration.

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    Article
    Avatar of cncfCNCF·19w

    CNCF Announces Dragonfly’s Graduation

    Dragonfly, a cloud native image and file distribution system, has graduated from CNCF after demonstrating production readiness and widespread adoption. The project uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute container images, OCI artifacts, and AI models at scale, saving up to 90% storage bandwidth and reducing launch times from minutes to seconds. Major organizations including Ant Group, Alibaba, Datadog, DiDi, and Kuaishou use Dragonfly to power large-scale container and AI workloads. Since joining CNCF, the project has seen over 3,000% growth in code contributions, expanding from 45 contributors across 5 companies to 271 contributors across 130+ companies. Future development will focus on accelerating AI model distribution using RDMA, optimizing image layouts for AI workloads, and implementing load-aware scheduling.

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    Article
    Avatar of rhdevRed Hat Developer·19w

    How to deploy .NET applications with systemd and Podman

    .NET applications can be deployed as systemd services using containerization. The .NET SDK's PublishContainer target creates container images that can be distributed via registries or tarballs. Podman quadlets simplify systemd service creation by generating service files from specialized container unit files. The Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Systemd package enables proper integration with systemd for startup signaling, shutdown handling, and journal logging. Rootless containers use user namespace mapping to isolate container users, and host directories can be mounted with proper SELinux labels and ownership. Services can run under dedicated user accounts for additional isolation.

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