What is the difference between storage driver and graphdriver in docker?

Question

So, what is the difference between storage driver and graphdriver in docker? I can not find any useful information through google. Is there anyone can help me? thanks!

Answer 1

Where are containerd’s graph drivers?

The above blog post by Michael Crosby has some interesting information which might help you, because it describes the history / evolution of things and how he and Solomon Hykes designed and implemented them.

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My summary before you read the whole article:

(used parts of the blog post will be in italics)

• containerd is the container runtime used by Docker
• "The short answer is that containerd does not have graph drivers"
• To find the term graph drivers you will have to go back to Docker 0.8 timeframe
• Snapshotters to the rescue: Fast forward 3 years in the future and it was time to rethink how graph drivers worked with containers. As part of the containerd work, we had the time to hit the breaks and fix some of these long standing issues.
• In the end, snapshotters are an evolution of graph drivers. We set out to fix the long standing issues with graph drivers that users were facing and fix them in a way that we can support for years to come.