The OCI community is comprised of a diverse set of member organizations 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: Miska Kaipiainen
Title: Founder & CEO
Company: Kontena, Inc.

Why did you join OCI?
We see OCI as the most important organization in the container ecosystem driving vendor neutrality, standardization and making this amazing technology accessible globally. Just like many other companies working with containers, we are strong believers in open source, open APIs and open ecosystems in general. We joined OCI to contribute to its mission which helps us and everyone else in this industry to be successful.

How is your organization involved in OCI?
We plan to take an active role in collaboratively on improving OCI specifications, tooling and look forward to being more engaged with other members.

What are the aspects of the runtime spec and/or image format spec that you are looking forward to most for your company?
We enjoy vendor neutrality and collaboration for developing container runtimes that are based on open standards.

How do you plan to use the runtime spec and/or image format spec?
We want to incorporate and support the runtime spec in our Kontena Platform open source project, via runC. Soon, we also plan to support the image spec in our own hosted image registry service.

How will these specifications help your business?
These specifications will provide our users with the confidence to get started with containers while having the promise of no vendor lock-in. In addition, these specifications have stabilized some of the core technology components we use.

How do you anticipate OCI changing the container technology landscape?
OCI has already shown its ability to create solid standards and specifications for an industry that’s moving at the speed of light. This community’s work has already produced amazing results through increased interoperability, recognition and adoption. However, there are still so many things we can accomplish with collaboration to help ensure open standards, interoperability and vendor neutrality.

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?
The benefit of using a runtime and image spec based on OCI is the ability to develop and package once, distribute, deploy and run anywhere. We predict that more vendors will be bringing out runtimes that do their own magic to benefit their specific end users. We’ve always been believers in this market not being a “one solution for all” type of situation, as there are a multitude of users, use cases and needs that no one solution can single handedly meet. Open APIs and standards will enable more vendors to build meaningful solutions that will then benefit the end user with more choice and less lock-in through easier interchangeability of components.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining OCI?
Get on-board and help shape the industry from the inside rather than staying out!