The OCI community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that are committed to creating open industry standards around a container image format and runtime. This blog series highlights OCI members and their contributions to building an open, portable and vendor neutral specification.

Name: Guohui Liu
Title: Co-founder and CTO
Company: EasyStack

Why did you join OCI?
Trends in cloud native computing are still on the rise. Businesses are evolving faster than ever before as applications require more agile and scalable infrastructure, and container technology is right at the center of it all. Unified standards are imperative for container technology to evolve and develop, with input and participation from the entire ecosystem. We believe the Open Container Initiative (OCI), with its runtime and image format specifications, plays a leading role in actualizing the ability to “package once, run anywhere” for applications.

Openness is a part of EasyStack’s DNA. We believe container technology will fill the gap between traditional IT and cloud native IT. We are among the first to release a converged infrastructure cloud platform featuring both containers and OpenStack cloud, and are looking forward to sharing our rich experiences with enterprise cloud native infrastructure offerings with the global OCI community.

How is your organization involved in OCI?
EasyStack is an active participant in the broader open source community, and we believe it is equally important to contribute to upstream open source projects to help address enterprise customer needs. Today — based on OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, Ceph and other open source technologies– EasyStack provides an open, secure, stable, reliable, and high-performance cloud computing capability for 200+ enterprise customers for their cloud infrastructure. As part of OCI, we are sharing our enterprise cloud and application model experience with the upstream community.

What are the aspects of the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
The runtime spec and image format spec provide container standards, which is very important to both vendors and users. Trends in cloud native are encouraging more and more enterprise users to deploy containers, and many of them are already in production. This means reliability and consistent upgrades are extremely important. Additionally, API compatibility and scalability is imperative, especially in customized enterprise scenarios.

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
We leverage OCI v1.0 the runtime spec in our ESContainer Linux already, providing a reliable and stable container runtime. This allows us to focus on the development of true application-oriented orchestration, leveraging additional technologies such as Kubernetes.

How will these specifications help your business?
These specifications provide standardized and reliable image format and runtime specifications, allowing us to better and more efficiently develop ESContainer, shortening the development cycle. With these standards, the infrastructure provided by different vendors is of the same API so this avoids vendor lock-in, which helps our business to reduce risk (as well as costs, which in turn yields higher profits).

What do you believe the benefits of using a runtime and image spec based on the OCI standard are for hosting providers? For small ISVs, application developers? For end users?
OCI’s runtime and image format specs help all types of customers. The use of one standardized spec enables container applications to be deployed, run, and updated in a multi-cloud environment (e.g. public cloud, private cloud or community cloud) more quickly and efficiently. This is extremely helpful in today’s hybrid cloud environment and both the hosting providers and the end users will benefit from it.

ISVs and application developers now have standards to follow, which can help reduce the risk of going in the wrong direction while avoiding vendor lock-in as they build container applications.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI?
If you and/or your organization’s vision align with current cloud native trends, just join OCI. Today, it is almost impossible for one company to really dominate one hot technology and at the same time keep it active and advanced. Open technologies have proven successful for rapid development, and OCI is a great example of this. New members to the OCI community can get started quickly with shared resources and support from across the community, in addition to having fun by contributing back.