The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is getting a step closer to providing a standard for containers. The organization has announced version 1.0 release candidates for its runtime and image specifications.
OCI was launched last summer as an initiative to address the challenges and fragmentation in the software container space by providing a common set of standards. That standards are designed to ensure containers can be used without being locked into specific infrastructures, cloud providers and tools.
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“Ultimately, we want to make sure that the original promise of containerization—portability, interoperability and agility—aren’t lost as we move to a world of applications built from multiple containers run using a diverse set of tools across a diverse set of infrastructures,” the OCI wrote on its website.
Version 1.0 of the standards is expected to define what software containers are, how containers can be used in a cross-platform way, provide a versioning schema, address dynamic container updates, and ensure base configuration compatibility and full life-cycle hooks. According to the OCI’s release process, it needs to put out at least three release candidates before it can declare a version 1.0. This will be the second release candidate for runtime, and the first for image.
In addition, the OCI announced two new tools projects associated with the runtime and image spec. The runtime tools project will provide tools for testing runtimes implemented on the OCI runtime spec, while the image tools project will test and validate for container images on the OCI image spec.
