The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has today announced the launch of the 1.0 versions of both its container runtime and image specs for software containers. Established in 2015 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, the OCI was founded by container platform specialists Docker, CoreOS and several smaller players in the software container industry. The purpose behind the OCI’s creation was to ensure the maintenance of open industry standards around software container formats and runtime.
Today, the OCI boasts the involvement of major enterprise cloud computing providers including Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud, in addition to tech companies that have cloud-related operations like IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, Red Hat and VMware, among others.
Container technology allows software developers to create applications using lightweight packages of code that can be deployed independently. Its popularity within the software industry has been steadily rising since developers are now able to run multiple containers on a single operating system, thereby requiring less processing overhead when compared to virtual machines.
The version 1.0 release outlines the standard ways to specify how containers are used. In a blog post, the OCI declared that its latest work is:
Developing common, minimal, open standards and specifications around container technology without the fear of lock-in.
The OCI also stated that as with any similar 1.0 release, the idea is to signal that the specs are now ready for wide adoption and that there will not be any breaking changes.