[vbezhenar]

This is not correct.

Kubernetes used docker engine under the hood in the past. Now they abstracted useful part of this engine into API. There's implementation from the docker (containerd), there's implementation from Redhat (CRI-O), may be others. Docker don't have to be installed for Kubernetes to work anymore.

Building container images is a different topic. Kubernetes does not have anything to offer here. So you probably still need docker in your development machine and in your CI pipeline to build those images. There are plenty of alternatives rised in recent years, most prominent ones are kaniko, buildah/podman, but they're far from docker in their maturity.

That actually makes a problem. It's hard to run docker and kubernetes side-by-side. Or docker inside kubernetes. So if you want to run your CI jobs inside Kubernetes, there's no good solutions right now.

I think people will eventually migrate to Kaniko. It's from Google, it seems to be a sane approach. But right now it's a mess.

[urthor]

This is correct.

K8s abstracted out containerization in preparation for the anticipated long term migration of the ecosystem to Podman et al (lots and lots of people are invested in moving "containers" away from "Docker").

[moondev]

I don't think podman is designed or supported as a CRI. It's for local development. You can create local "pods" without an API server, but not running containers on a real Kubernetes node. That would be containerd, crio, or cri-dockerd.

With that said I still prefer docker for local development by creating real ephemeral clusters with kind