Containers share a kernel, so a container is not a security boundary by default. This is the practical hardening that makes one act like a boundary — minimal pinned images, a signed and scanned supply chain, dropped capabilities and seccomp, and a Kubernetes securityContext that actually holds.
Containers
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Container Security in 2026: The Threat Model, the Supply Chain, and a Pod That Can't Hurt You -
k3s vs k8s: Lightweight Kubernetes or the Full Thing? k3s is not a fork of Kubernetes or a stripped-down imitation — it is a CNCF-certified, fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that happens to ship as a single sub-70MB binary and run the control plane in a few hundred megabytes of RAM. So 'k3s vs k8s' is really a packaging and operations question, not an API question: your manifests and Helm charts run unchanged on both. This post breaks down what k3s actually changes (the kine datastore shim, SQLite instead of etcd by default, bundled batteries like Traefik and ServiceLB, removed legacy in-tree drivers), the real resource and operational differences, high-availability options, where each one wins, and where k3s's conveniences can surprise you.
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Firecracker and the microVM Amazon's open-source VMM behind Lambda and Fargate: KVM-backed microVMs that boot in around 125ms on a deliberately minimal device model, the jailer that wraps the hypervisor in chroot, seccomp, and cgroups for defense-in-depth, snapshotting for near-instant clones and pre-warmed pools, and the pattern for building your own multi-tenant function or sandbox runtime. Plus an honest comparison with gVisor, Kata Containers, and Cloud Hypervisor — and where each one actually fits.
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Incus and LXD: The Lightweight Cluster That Auto-Places Canonical's LXD and its community fork Incus: system containers plus real VMs under one excellent CLI, a REST API, and a built-in web UI. Minimal overhead, clustering that automatically lands new instances on the least-loaded member, container density plus full virtual machines when you need them. The fork politics, the auto-placement scriptlet, the lighter multi-tenancy story, and why this is the best low-effort path to self-service-with-placement for mostly-Linux workloads.
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gVisor and Kata Containers: Sandboxed Container Runtimes for Multi-Tenant Kubernetes A deep dive into gVisor's Sentry syscall interception and Kata Containers' microVM approach — architecture, installation, RuntimeClass, performance trade-offs, and when your workloads actually need hardware isolation.
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Container Security in the Cloud: From Image to Runtime Supply chain hardening with Cosign and Syft, ECR scanning, Pod Security Standards, Falco runtime detection, network policies, External Secrets Operator, and admission controllers.
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Kubernetes Debugging in Production A systematic approach to CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, Pending pods, DNS failures, network policy blocks, and certificate errors — with the exact commands to run at each stage.
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Azure Linux 4.0 and Azure Container Linux GA: Microsoft's Hardened OS for Cloud-Native and AI Workloads Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0 preview and Azure Container Linux GA at OSS Summit NA 2026 — a Fedora-based VM OS with atomic updates, AI-workload hardening, and a TCMalloc-Azure performance upgrade, alongside a sub-300MB container-only image purpose-built for AKS.
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Containerization and Virtualization: Every Platform Compared A comprehensive comparison of every major virtualization and containerization platform — Docker, LXC, KVM, VMware, VirtualBox, Proxmox, Singularity, Podman, and more. What each does, when to use it, and how to choose.
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Trivy: Container and IaC Vulnerability Scanning A complete guide to Trivy — scanning container images, filesystems, Terraform, Kubernetes clusters, and generating SBOMs with a single tool.
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Dagger: Portable CI/CD Pipelines That Run Everywhere Write CI/CD pipelines in Go, Python, or TypeScript that run identically on your laptop and in CI — no more YAML hell, no more 'works locally but fails in GitHub Actions'. A complete Dagger guide.
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K3s on Raspberry Pi and Homelab: Lightweight Kubernetes That Actually Works A complete hands-on guide to running K3s on Raspberry Pi hardware and homelab servers — from bare-metal bootstrap to production-grade workloads with ingress, persistent storage, and GitOps deployments.
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Linux Namespaces and cgroups: The Kernel Primitives That Make Containers Possible A deep dive into the Linux kernel features that underpin every container runtime — namespaces for isolation and cgroups for resource control. Understanding these makes you a better operator and demystifies what Docker and Kubernetes are actually doing.
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Supply Chain Security: SBOMs, Sigstore, Cosign, and SLSA A practical guide to software supply chain security — generating SBOMs with Syft, signing artifacts with Cosign and Sigstore, verifying provenance with SLSA, and integrating these controls into your CI/CD pipeline.
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Container Image Hardening: Distroless, Multi-Stage Builds, and Vulnerability Scanning A practical, in-depth guide to reducing your container attack surface through distroless base images, multi-stage builds, Trivy vulnerability scanning, and CI/CD integration — covering everything from Dockerfile patterns to Kubernetes securityContext settings.
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Docker Compose for Homelab: Multi-Service Stacks Done Right A deep-dive into Docker Compose for homelabbers and self-hosters — covering Compose file anatomy, environment management, networking, healthchecks, real-world stack examples, and production-readiness tips that scale from a Raspberry Pi to a full rack.
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Kubernetes for the Homelab: K3s Setup, Workloads, and Beyond A thorough guide to running Kubernetes in your homelab using K3s — covering installation, core concepts, workload deployment, ingress with TLS, persistent storage, migrating from Docker Compose, Helm, GitOps, and cluster operations.
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Podman vs Docker: Rootless Containers, Pods, and the Case for Switching A deep technical comparison of Podman and Docker covering the daemonless architecture, rootless containers, Kubernetes-native pods, systemd Quadlets, and a practical migration guide for sysadmins and developers ready to make the switch.
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Traefik: The Complete Guide to the Cloud-Native Reverse Proxy A comprehensive deep-dive into Traefik — the modern cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer. Covers core architecture, Docker auto-discovery with labels, automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt, the full middleware ecosystem, routing rules, ForwardAuth and SSO, observability, HTTP/3, and the tips and tricks that make it the go-to proxy for home labs and production Kubernetes clusters alike.
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Docker Best Practices for Local Development Container optimization, volume mounts, multi-stage builds, and common pitfalls to avoid.
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Kubernetes Basics: Getting Started with Container Orchestration Learn the fundamental concepts of Kubernetes and how to deploy your first application.
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The Twelve-Factor App Methodology The twelve-factor methodology is the reason a modern app can be torn down and rebuilt anywhere from its source and config alone. This is a walk through all twelve factors grouped by what they actually buy you — portability, disposability, and scale — plus an honest look at where the 2011 manifesto shows its age in a world of containers, Kubernetes, and secret managers.