About eight months ago, the engineers at Docker Inc. decided that its popular container platform was in need of a revamp and set out to break up the complex tangle of components that formed its core architecture.

The long-awaited product of their efforts arrived today in the form of “containerd,” a runtime module that is available separately from Docker Engine as a standalone GitHub project. It includes the tooling needed to manage the core functions of a container. Among others, the framework controls how Docker instances interact with the system on which they’re deployed and provides the ability to orchestrate key operations such as loading application images.

Actions specified by containerd are carried out using another component called runC that is itself a do-over of Docker’s original execution module. The startup donated the code for the latter technology to the Open Container Initiative, a consortium that it set up last June with several other companies to create a common industry standard for containers.

Brian Gracely, the director of product strategy at open-source giant Red Hat Inc., put the release of containerd into context for SiliconANGLE. “When the Open Container Initiative got started, Docker contributed some of their code base but it was only about half of what was needed. The piece that wasn’t there was what got announced this morning,” he explained.

Today’s rollout aims to create a “clear separation between the tech and Docker,” Gracely added. “This makes it very clear where the open source projects are and where the entity is. People will have a formal model of whether they want to engage with Docker or the open-source [technology].”

As part of the effort, Docker will move containerd under the wing of an independent foundation in the first quarter of 2017. The group will allow members of the open-source community to have a say in the framework’s development roadmap and contribute enhancements. At least some of those externally-developed features can be expected to make their way back into Docker Engine, which will benefit all of the companies that rely on it to power their applications.

Moreover, tech-savvy users now have the ability to tailor containerd for their specific needs or even incorporate its source code into custom management systems. Creating tailored versions of popular open-source tools is an especially common habit among web giants as Amazon Inc. and Facebook Inc. that have unique operational requirements due to their size. Both companies said that they will contribute to the development of containerd as did Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc., IBM Corp. and China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

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