Container internals

Learning path | 7 resources | 3 hrs and 50 mins | Published on September 18, 2025
Ryan Jarvinen Don Schenck

Building applications for Kubernetes and OpenShift requires an understanding of containers, which are small images that are preassembled and deployed to a host for execution. This series of lessons gives a basic understanding on containers, useful for application developers.

Download Podman Access the Developer Sandbox

 

  1. Overview: Container Internals
  2. Containers 101 Page | 25 mins
  3. Container images details Page | 25 mins
  4. Trust Page | 25 mins
  5. Container engines and the Linux kernel Page | 35 mins
  6. Multi-container applications Page | 1 hr and 15 mins
  7. Image specifications Page | 45 mins

Overview: Container Internals

Feature image for Red Hat OpenShift

Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes? The basic processing unit of this computing model is the container, a small executable that runs on the host. A container is portable, quick to start, and contains all of the bits needed, except for the Linux kernel. There are other pieces of technology related to containers that should be understood, such as registries, hosts, images, and orchestration, to name a few. Using Podman on your PC and the Developer Sandbox (a no-cost OpenShift cluster), you will explore and learn about these pieces and how a developer uses them to build applications.

In order to get full benefit from taking this lesson, you need:

In this learning path, you will learn about:

  • Containers.
  • Container images.
  • Container hosts.
  • Container orchestration.
  • Container standards.
  • The container tool ecosystem.