The mechanics of isolated workloads

Inspect the lifecycle of a container through filesystem mounts, process setup, resource accounting, and runtime failure behavior.

10 published lessons1 module264 min of guided study
  1. 01
    The mechanics of isolated workloadsadvanced · 10 lessons

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The mechanics of isolated workloads

Inspect the lifecycle of a container through filesystem mounts, process setup, resource accounting, and runtime failure behavior.

  1. 01

    Container init: signals, children, and the lifetime of PID 1

    Trace namespace init, orphan adoption, wait-based reaping, and shutdown without assuming that a shell wrapper behaves like an init process.

    25 min
  2. 02

    Mount propagation: isolate topology as well as pathnames

    Distinguish mount namespaces, shared peer groups, slave propagation, recursive operations, and root changes from ordinary file-content isolation.

    26 min
  3. 03

    OverlayFS: a small write can trigger a large copy-up

    Trace upper/lower lookup, data and metadata copy-up, whiteouts, and storage amplification under explicit OverlayFS feature settings.

    25 min
  4. 04

    User namespaces: map identities without inventing host authority

    Apply an explicit UID/GID range mapping and distinguish namespace-relative privilege from permissions on host resources and other kernel boundaries.

    26 min
  5. 05

    Capabilities: remove authority from the right sets at the right time

    Distinguish effective, permitted, inheritable, bounding, and ambient capability sets and verify the final post-exec privilege state.

    27 min
  6. 06

    Seccomp filters: inspect syscall arguments without inventing pathname knowledge

    Define the data available to a Linux seccomp BPF filter, its action composition, inheritance, ABI checks, and limitations around pointed-to memory.

    27 min
  7. 07

    CPU quota: a shared time budget rather than dedicated cores

    Relate cgroup v2 quota and period to aggregate CPU time, bursty parallel consumption, hierarchical throttling, and measured scheduling behavior.

    26 min
  8. 08

    Memory controls: pressure, hard limits, and OOM evidence

    Distinguish cgroup v2 memory.high and memory.max, hierarchical charging, reclaim, swap, and evidence for why a process was killed.

    27 min
  9. 09

    Devices and hooks: preserve the actual trust boundary

    Separate device-node visibility from device authorization and scope OCI hook execution to the correct namespace, phase, and privilege context.

    27 min
  10. 10

    Container forensics: reconstruct the failing transition

    Correlate runtime phases, process identity, namespace and mount state, file descriptors, and cgroup event deltas before assigning a cause.

    28 min
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