Docker Engine 1.11 will use containerd for container supervision. Because containerd ultimately relies on runC and the OCI specification for container execution, this will open the door for the Engine to be able to use any OCI compliant runtime.

This new architecture will also open the door for potentially making it possible to upgrade the daemon without shutting down all running containers in the future, and will bring a significant performance boost when handling a big amount of containers. Following the plumbing philosophy, a great aspect of this design is that Docker Engine execution layer will be entirely relying on well delimited tools that can be used independently, with the drawback that it won't ship as a single binary anymore.