The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is the governing body responsible for creating open standards for container formats and runtimes. Established in June 2015 by Docker, CoreOS, and the maintainers of appc*, OCI operates under the Linux Foundation with the goal of developing vendor-neutral, open industry standards for container technologies.
OCI has developed several key specifications:
- Runtime Specification (runtime-spec): Defines how to run a filesystem bundle that is unpacked on disk.
- Image Specification (image-spec): Describes the format for container images, facilitating their creation, sharing, and execution.
- Distribution Specification (distribution-spec): Specifies the API protocol to standardise the distribution of content, ensuring interoperability across different platforms and tools.
These specifications are widely adopted in the container ecosystem, promoting consistency and compatibility across various platforms and tools.
What is App Container (appc)?
This refers to a specification for application containers, defining aspects such as image format, runtime environment, and discovery mechanisms. The goal of appc is to provide a well-specified and community-developed standard for packaging and running applications in containers, promoting composability, security, decentralization, and openness. Tools and projects have been developed around this specification to facilitate building and managing containerized applications.