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: Jake Warner
Title: CEO / Founder
Company: Cycle.io

Why did you join OCI?
At the end of the day, it would have been much harder for us to get started as a company without the previous OCI members and contributors coming together and developing runC and the runtime-spec. As our company continues to grow, we look forward to joining and contributing to the movement started by the OCI.

How is your organization involved in OCI?
At the moment, we’re an implementer of runC and the runtime specification. Coincidentally, we had begun the development of Cycle only a matter of days before runC was donated to the OCI by Docker. As a CaaS and container orchestration platform, being part of the organization which is key to standardizing containers was a no-brainer for us.

What are the aspects of the the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
Once the image spec is finalized with a v1.0 release, we’ll begin to see even more container projects come to life. Given the nature of Cycle being a CaaS platform, being able to support a wide variety of container build tools is fantastic.

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
We truly lucked out with the timing of the initial spec and the start of Cycle’s development. Because of this, we’ve built our systems around the runtime spec from day one.

How will these specifications help your business?
In a world where new technologies are appearing every day, being able to fall back to standards keeps everything moving forward. Having a well designed spec helps ensure Cycle can continue to integrate with things that haven’t yet been built.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
Really, it already has. Now days, even sitting in container chatrooms on Slack or IRC, developers from companies who would otherwise be competing are working together to ensure containers are a solution to everyone’s problem. Having an organization that helps ensure stability across ‘super hot’ technologies like containers can only be a good thing.

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?
Given that Cycle provides bare-metal container hosting for our users, the runtime spec (and RunC) is invaluable to us. The ability to be complementary to other container build systems and integration tools is key to our success.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI?
Do it. Even if you don’t have a ton of time to be involved in everything that takes place, you’re supporting an incredibly helpful organization and making an impact on what will be the future of application development/deployment. OCI members, code contributors, testers, and even those who really enjoy writing documentation, everyone has something to offer!