Progress Report: Open Container Initiative

Last June, we launched the Open Container Initiative, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The OCI was designed to collaborate on an open, standard container format and runtime in order to preserve that portability and interoperability for users. We’re very happy with the progress OCI has made, and we wanted to share that with you.

Since the foundation of the OCI, we’ve had six releases of runc, and one of the specification. In particular, we wanted to highlight that runC now has advanced features like checkpoint and restore for live migration of containers and seccomp support for syscall filtering for added security.

Collectively, there’s been over 150 contributions to the spec and runC, and we have lots of new contributors. There’s still work to be done, so if you want to contribute your help is definitely welcome. You can take a look at the specification roadmap, and the runC repository for more info on how to get involved.

At Docker, we really love runC, which works on top of libcontainer, a core tech for Docker Engine. In an upcoming version of Docker Engine, we’ll be directly using runC. We’re also happy to see that Cloud Foundry is building it into the Garden project.

Today, OCI has been established as an official collaborative project under the Linux Foundation: 38 member companies have signed the project’s charter. The OCI governance model defines 3 entities:

– The Technical Developer Community is composed of the core maintainers, nine members who are individuals, as well as people from founding organizations: they have been at work in the past 6 months.
– The Technical Oversight Board, an appeal board for the technical Developer Community, composed of nine individuals, with elections planned for January.
– The Trademark Board, composed of one representative appointed by each OCI Member, will set-up a certification process for OCI.

Again, we’re really happy with the OCI progress and look forward to the spec reaching 1.0 soon. And thank you to the hard working members of OCI for all the work you’re doing!

Learn More about Docker

• New to Docker? Try our 10 min online tutorial
• Share images, automate builds, and more with a free Docker Hub account
• Read the Docker 1.9 Release Notes
• Subscribe to Docker Weekly
• Register for upcoming Docker Online Meetups
• Attend upcoming Docker Meetups
• Watch DockerCon EU 2015 videos
• Start contributing to Docker