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

Name: Nan Zhou
Title: Senior Standards Engineer
Company: Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd.

Why did you join OCI?
Huawei sees container portability as one of the most critical aspects in container technology. We believe that the industry needs OCI’s open standards, which allow others to build, pull and run containers anywhere. Huawei, therefore, joined OCI to help standardize necessary container technologies to ensure enhanced container portability.

How is your organization involved in OCI?
Huawei contributors are very active in the community. For example, Qiang Huang is one of the maintainers of the runc and runtime-tools projects. Chenye Liang created OCT, which was later merged with the OCI Tools project, and became the runtime-tools project. Huawei also serves in the OCI Trademark Board and Certification Working Group (which is currently underway).

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
Huawei container solutions such as FusionStage will use the OCI compatible runtime and image spec, allowing us to better focus on customer needs.

How will these specifications help your business?
The open standards of OCI (runtime spec and image format spec) are protecting the market from fragmentation by creating a multi-vendor environment that brings interoperability and a guarantee of quality. These are the basis for faster and wider adoption of container technology.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
The industry needs a solid foundation in which to build a strong container ecosystem; we believe this solid foundation is found in OCI’s specifications. And the new standard development process implemented in OCI, which is different from traditional standardization organizations but achieves similar goals, can be applied to other open source software.

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?
Once built, application images can run everywhere, regardless of different types/implementations of runtime. Therefore, OCI standards reduce the complexity of developing applications and avoid vendor lock-in for all container players.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI? The community is open and contributions are welcome. Join the community, bring your knowledge and shape the industry standards together: https://www.opencontainers.org/community