Recipes and Runtimes: Making Sense of Containers in 2026

If you feel overwhelmed by jargon thrown around in forums, conferences, and headlines focussed on containers and the cloud, you’re not alone. In 2026, image hardening, provenance, secure supply chains—oops, it’s happening again, isn’t it? Let’s step back.

This workshop takes a hands-on, bottom-up approach to understand containerization. Build along as we containerize a simple app and run it, starting with a naive approach and iteratively improving it until we have a production-grade image. At each step, new concepts are introduced only once we've understood the need for them. We'll work with Docker, Podman, understand container runtimes, even learn to use new-age tools like Rockcraft and Chisel.

To make this fun, we’ll use baking as a guiding analogy: images as recipes, dependencies as ingredients, and runtime environments as kitchens.

By the end, you’ll be able to walk confidently into real-world discussions about containers, ready to participate and learn better.

"Catch-up" with all that has happened in the world of containers, understand first-principles and ultimately work your way up to the concepts dominating the conversation today. The idea is to enable beginners to start contributing to and engaging in, the discussions and work happening today in the sphere of containers and cloud technologies.