So far we have discussed about runc, containerd in detail and their relative counterparts. We now need to take a look at the component called shim. The shim is integral to the implementation of daemonless containers and separating the low-level container runtimes such as crun or runc from high-level container runtimes such as containerd. As we discussed earlier that containerd uses runc to create new containers. In fact, it forks a new instance of runc for every container it creates. However, once each container is created, the parent runc process exits. This means we can run hundreds of containers without having to run hundreds of runc instances.

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