About OCI
The Open Containers initiative was established in June 2015 by Docker, one of the many early leaders of the container industry that provided an intuitive API to interact with linux containers.
Challenges for OCI
Why did the OCI get established in the first place? This is a longer, more complicated story that will be updated by maintainers who can recollect their experience. Generally, we can guess that there were several questions and challenges that warranted community discussion and support:
- How do I interact with a container, for example, to run or stop it?
- How do I store contents and metadata inside of a container?
- What are the minimal set of required metadata?
- How do I share or distribute my containers?
If containers were to be successful, meaning they would have widespread adoption across different systems, and development of tools for interaction, answering these questions for a single use case was not good enough. We needed an open platform for discussion and development, and this led to the establishment of OCI.
Continued Challenges
Container technologies change on a regular basis, as do the needs of society and research groups. As new problems and use cases are brought to light, it’s important that the standards for containers are continually challenged to address them. For this reason, it’s up to you to contribute your issues, thoughts, and questions about the OCI specifications catered to your use case. If there is an issue, it’s the responsibility of the community to discuss and address it.
Where do I go from here?
Now that you’ve learned a little about OCI, we suggest that you start with our introductory material.