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: Alexis Richardson
Title: CEO
Company: Weaveworks

Why did you join OCI?
We joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and OCI at the same time. The two projects complement each other and have the overall goal of providing customers with a clear set of tools, standards and guidance for the adoption of containers and cloud native technology. The OCI in particular is focused on standardizing core container technology – runtime and image format – and we want to support that goal.

What are the aspects of the the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
A stable reference implementation of the spec would lower testing costs.

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec? As a vendor, we want Weave software to work with the finalized OCI standard in the future so that our products will be compatible with as many other container-related products as possible. For example, our SDN Weave Net could provide network security policy and firewall capabilities to any OCI-compatible container. Or a customer might monitor and manage an app that uses OCI technology, using our Weave Cloud product.

How will these specifications help your business?
We think that customers will adopt containers and cloud native technology faster if there is a family of core technologies that they can trust supported by a thriving ecosystem of products and services. A good specification can remove obstacles and prevent some challenges that could potentially slow this down.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
Perhaps by marking out an industry that is more mature, as with the early evolution of HTTP in the 1990s. With this we hope to see greater participation and opportunity, as when big web businesses emerged.

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?
For end users, it’s all about the infrastructure becoming a standard layer. Everyone wants to focus on applications and how to make them better using cloud native patterns like microservices and continuous delivery. Hosting providers must control cost-to-serve. A stable image spec and runtime would help with that. For ISVs and app developers, testing costs matter. Ideally the deployment surface of software is known and small.