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: Tianon Gravi
Title: SVP of Operations
Company: InfoSiftr

Why did you join OCI and how is your organization involved?
The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a critical open source organization helping ensure compatibility and interoperability for the basic components of containers. We believe in the mission of the OCI and, as contributors and maintainers in the container ecosystem, will continue to lend expertise and effort to further the group’s goals. On an individual level, I have been involved since the foundation of OCI and am a member of the OCI’s Technical Developer Community (TDC), having worked on the container runtime specifications since the foundation of the OCI.

What are the aspects of the the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
By encouraging standardization and interoperability, the specs help enable differentiation further up the stack, where it benefits all users. Additionally, companies can feel safer in adopting containers knowing that at a foundational level, they aren’t locked into any one vendor’s solution (which is all thanks to these low-level standards).

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
Any development work we do in the container space will adhere to OCI specifications, and encourage their use and furtherance within the ecosystem.

How will these specifications help your business?
The specifications will help all businesses with an interest in containers, whether they are contributing to the container ecosystem or just consuming container-based technology. This flexibility helps us in our own day-to-day operations, but also helps our clients as they evaluate and commit to container-based solutions and deployments.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
The OCI’s standards create a “baseline for competition.” Now that we have an agreed upon foundation, companies can proceed to innovate and compete in more interesting ways.

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?
If you’re doing anything in technology, it’s useful to adhere to standards. Much of the container ecosystem is still new and evolving, and we’re bound to see changes to technology stacks going forward. Adhering to the specifications set forth by the OCI means we all agree the underlying details of our tooling and products will be compatible and interoperable, whatever higher-level changes may come.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI? Contributing to the underlying specifications of the container ecosystem is sometimes difficult and involved work, but it can be very rewarding. Joining the OCI is a great way to start doing exactly that: https://www.opencontainers.org/join