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

Name: John Gossman
Title: Partner, Azure Engineering
Company: Microsoft

Why did you join OCI?
Microsoft listens to our users and cloud users want solutions that are open and widely backed and supported by a broad community of vendors and other users. We see OCI as providing the basis for adoption of stable container technologies that meet these user requirements.

How is your organization involved in OCI?
Microsoft is one of the founding members of the organization. We have representatives who are contributors and maintainers on the runtime and image spec and a seat on the Technical Oversight Board. Rob Dolin, senior program manager and technical diplomat at Microsoft Cross-Platform Interoperability team, is chair of the Trademark Board Certification Program Working Group.

What are the aspects of the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
The interoperability and compatibility promises of the specs will make building higher-level tools and services that work together easier.

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
We will support the specs as part of our cloud offerings on Linux, Windows and potentially other operating systems. We will also use our particular expertise to ensure Windows Server Containers and related tooling can use the same format specifications.

How will these specifications help your business?
We believe that open source and standard specs will accelerate container and cloud adoption. We also build container-based services and software that will benefit from the interoperability of the OCI specs.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
Stable technologies enable faster innovation higher up the technology stack. We believe OCI will enable a wide range of orchestration, monitoring, packaging, deployment and other tools and runtimes. OCI is only the beginning; it is almost impossible to imagine all of the new container-based technologies that will emerge in the next few years.

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 all parties, OCI promises portability, compatibility and interoperability. Because of the broad support of the open source community, nobody needs fear vendor lock-in.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI? OCI can only succeed if it addresses the needs of all parties. So come on in, the water’s fine!