The kubelet can talk to containerd's cri endpoint, yes, but there's one additional bit of complexity.
If someone wants to use kubelet + docker so that they can, for example, ssh into a node and type 'docker ps' to see containers, or have something else using the docker api see the containers the kubelet started, that won't work after re-pointing the kubelet from docker to containerd.
The difference here is namespacing[0], but not the linux-kernel-container-namespace, rather the containerd concept by the same name to allow "multi-tenancy" of a single containerd daemon.
In addition, I don't think you could have docker + cri run in the same containerd namespace since they end up using different networking and storage containerd plugins. I think that terminology is right.
So yeah, repointing the kubelet to containerd directly works fine, but it won't be the same thing as running docker containers.
If someone wants to use kubelet + docker so that they can, for example, ssh into a node and type 'docker ps' to see containers, or have something else using the docker api see the containers the kubelet started, that won't work after re-pointing the kubelet from docker to containerd.
The difference here is namespacing[0], but not the linux-kernel-container-namespace, rather the containerd concept by the same name to allow "multi-tenancy" of a single containerd daemon.
In addition, I don't think you could have docker + cri run in the same containerd namespace since they end up using different networking and storage containerd plugins. I think that terminology is right.
So yeah, repointing the kubelet to containerd directly works fine, but it won't be the same thing as running docker containers.
[0]: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/blob/9561d938/docs/...