With ContainerCon Europe currently underway in Berlin, we want to share some of the great progress the Open Container Initiative (OCI) has made.

The OCI was launched with the express purpose of developing standards for the container format and runtime that will give everyone the ability to fully commit to container technologies today without worrying that their current choice of infrastructure, cloud provider or tooling will lock them in.

Last month, the OCI formed two new tools projects: runtime tools and image tools. These projects are associated with the OCI runtime spec and image format spec and serve as repositories for testing tools:

• Runtime Tools: Tools for testing container runtimes implementing the OCI runtime spec, including code that tests a runtime’s conformance to the OCI runtime spec
• Image Tools: Tools for testing of container images implementing the OCI image spec, including code that validates a file’s conformance to the OCI image format spec

We’ve also made significant progress on the runtime spec and image format spec, which are essential to furthering the proliferation and adoption of containers as they give companies confidence in the ability to move their containers between clouds.

In order to encourage ongoing, consistent communication and consensus-building during the development process, the OCI release process requires at least three release candidates (rc) before declaring v1.0. We are currently on the second release candidate for the runtime spec (v1.0.0 – rc2) and the first release candidate for the image spec(v1.0.0 – rc1).

As an open source project, any developer or end user can make contributions to the OCI, and we welcome feedback from the community on these release candidates and the new tools projects as we get closer to the official v1.0 release.

Projects associated to the Open Container Initiative can be found at https://github.com/opencontainers and you can learn more about joining the OCI community at https://www.opencontainers.org/community.