What is containerization?

Containerization, as introduced in the session "Meet Containerization" at WWDC 2025, is an open-source Swift framework designed for building containerized applications with a native feel. It provides APIs for image management, container execution, and a powerful INIT system built in Swift. The framework focuses on security, privacy, and performance, helping to shape its design and implementation of Linux containers.

Containers are a standard for building, testing, and deploying server-side applications. They allow workloads to be isolated from the host machine and from each other, providing a consistent environment across different deployment scenarios. Containers package an application and its dependencies into a single deployable unit, offering runtime isolation and the ability to replicate deployment environments locally.

The containerization framework by Apple provides a command-line tool for building, running, and managing containers, optimized for Apple Silicon, and offers secure isolation between container images. It is available as open source, and you can find more information and resources on the new Swift.org website and GitHub.

For a deeper dive into containerization, you can refer to the session Meet Containerization (03:50) which covers image management, virtualization, and container environment setup.