Container-Related Standards and Projects

There are several important standards and governance bodies influencing the development of containers and the container ecosystem. Some of these include:

• The OCI
• The CNCF
• The Moby Project

The Open Container Initiative (OCI)

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a governance council responsible for low-level container-related standards. It operates under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation and was founded in the early days of the container ecosystem when some of the people at a company called CoreOS didn’t like the way Docker was dominating the ecosystem. In response, CoreOS created an open standard called appc that defined specifications for things such as image format and container runtime. They also created a reference implementation called rkt (pronounced “rocket”). The appc standard did things differently from Docker and put the ecosystem in an awkward position with two competing standards.

While competition is usually a good thing, competing standards are generally bad, as they generate confusion that slows down user adoption. Fortunately, the main players in the ecosystem came together and formed the OCI as a vendor-neutral lightweight council to govern container standards. This allowed us to archive the appc project and place all low-level container-related specifications under the OCI’s governance.