What’s next for containers and standardization?

Containers are all the rage among developers who use open source software to build, test and run applications.
In the past couple of years, container interest and usage have grown rapidly. Nearly every major cloud provider and vendor has announced container-based solutions. Meanwhile, a proliferation of container-related start-ups has also appeared.
Hybrid solutions are the future of #cloud computing. They allow developers to more quickly and easily package applications to run across multiple environments. The open standardization of container runtimes and image specifications will help enable portability in a multi-cloud ecosystem.
While I welcome the spread of ideas in this space, the promise of containers as a source of application portability requires the establishment of certain standards. A little over a year ago, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) was founded with the mission of promoting a set of common, minimal, open standards and specifications around container technology. Since then, the OCI community has made a lot of progress.
In terms of developer activity, the OCI community has been busy. Last year the project saw 3000-plus project commitments from 128 different authors across 36 different organizations. With the addition of the Image Format specification project, OCI expanded its initial scope from just the runtime specification. We also added new developer tools projects such as runtime-tools and image-tools.
These serve as repositories for conformance testing tools and have been instrumental in gearing up for the upcoming v1.0 release. We’ve also recently created a new project within OCI called go-digest (which was donated and migrated from docker/go-digest). This provides a strong hash-identity implementation in Go and serves as a common digest package across the container ecosystem.
Regarding early adoption, Docker has supported the OCI technology through containerd. Recently, Docker announced it is spinning out its core container runtime functionality into a standalone component, incorporating it into a separate project called containerd and donating it to a neutral foundation in early 2017. Containerd will feature full OCI support, including the extended OCI image specification.
And Docker is only one example. The Cloud Foundry community was also an early consumer of OCI. It embedded runc through Garden as the cornerstone of its container runtime technology. The Kubernetes project is incubating a new Container Runtime Interface (CRI) that adopts OCI components through implementations like CRI-O and rklet. The rkt community is adopting OCI technology already and is planning to leverage the reference OCI container runtime runc in 2017. The Apache Mesos community is currently building out support for the OCI image specification. AWS recently announced its support of draft OCI specifications in its latest ECR release. IBM is also strongly committed to adopting the OCI draft specifications. The adoption is live today as part of the IBM Bluemix Container Service.
We are getting closer to launching the v1.0 release. The milestone release of the OCI Runtime and Image Format Specifications version 1.0 will hopefully be available later in 2017, drawing the industry that much closer to standardization and true portability. To that end, we’ll be launching an official OCI Certification program once the v1.0 release is out. With OCI certification, folks will be confident that their OCI-certified solutions meet a high set of criteria that deliver agile, interoperable solutions.
There is still a lot of work to do. The OCI community will be onsite at several industry events, including IBM InterConnect. The success of the OCI community depends on a wide array of contributions from across the industry. The door is always open, so please come join us in shaping the future of container technology.
If you’re interested in contributing, I recommend joining the OCI developer community, which is open to everyone. If you’re building products on OCI technology, I recommend joining as a member and participating in the upcoming certification program. Please follow us on Twitter to stay in touch: @OCI_ORG.
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