Docker does not exist: processes and reliability

Stop me if this has happened to you: you restart the Docker service expecting your Nginx container to die, and it just... keeps serving traffic. That's not a bug. It's the architecture telling you something important about what a "container" actually is. Here's the mental model shift: a Docker container isn't a VM-like object managed by Docker. It's an application process running on the host kernel, supervised by a chain of other processes— dockerd , containerd , containerd-shim , and runc . Docker as the brand is real; Docker the monolithic runtime is not. The Setup Everything below runs on Fedora Linux. MacOS/Windows users: Docker runs a Linux VM under the hood, so the process tree will be inside that VM, not directly on your host. First, enable live-restore in /etc/docker/daemon.json — this is what lets containers survive a Docker Engine restart: { "live-restore" : true } Then restart Docker and spin up Nginx: sudo service docker restart docker run --rm --name = my-nginx -p 8080:80