Docker, Inc. plans to donate its containerd open source project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Containerd is the core container runtime functionality — the bare-bones software — needed to create a Docker container.

In December Docker spun containerd into a standalone open source project and said it would be donating it to a neutral foundation in 2017. Today, the company presented a proposal to the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee for containerd to become a CNCF project. It hopes to get it accepted within a couple of weeks.

Containerd is designed as an independent component that can be embedded in a higher-level system to provide core container capabilities.

“Given that containerd has been the heart of the Docker platform since April 2016 when it was included in Docker 1.11, it is already deployed on millions of machines; we wanted it to continue its development under the governance of an organization where containerization was front and center,” wrote Solomon Hykes, co-founder and CTO of Docker, Inc., in a corporate blog post.

Docker with containerd is already a key foundation for Kubernetes which was the original project donated to the CNCF. Kubernetes 1.5 runs with Docker 1.10.3 to 1.12.3.

“Moving forward, we and key stakeholders from the Kubernetes project believe that containerd 1.0 can be a great core container runtime for Kubernetes,” wrote Hykes.

The containerd team has already been active implementing Phases 1 and 2 of the project’s roadmap.