Industry leading companies have come together to support a project to standardize software containers. The Open Container Project is a collaborative project involving Amazon, Cisco, Docker, HP, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Redhat, VMware, and others.
The OCP and its members will work together to build a standard that ensures container formats and runtime are based on a core set of values that includes openness, security, portability, composability, minimalism and backward compatibility. Within three months, the parties aim to complete creating the Project, migrating code and publishing a draft specification building on the technology donated by Docker.
From the press release:
The OCP image format will be backwards compatible with the Docker image format and appc and will include efforts to harmonize with other container efforts in the community.
The guiding principles around OCP standards are that they will:
- not be bound to higher level constructs such as a particular client or orchestration stack
- not be tightly associated with any particular commercial vendor or project and
- be portable across a wide variety of operating systems, hardware, CPU architectures, public clouds, etc.
There is also an FAQ to learn more about the project such as how it will benefit user on the opencontainers.org site. The project will also call a little corner of GitHub home at https://github.com/opencontainers/.