[rmetzler]

I guess - and I might be very wrong here - that the reason for client / server architecture was to be able to schedule docker containers on several hosts without the need to ssh into them. And I guess something like docker-in-docker or docker containers accessing the Unix socket would be more complicated.

[stingraycharles]

But why the need for Unix sockets or anything like that? Creating a container is a fancy fork(), and executing that through a foreign process (especially when on the same server) makes no sense to me.

Remember, containers are just Linux cgroups, there is nothing “special” about a container that requires a client/server.