Innovative Cloud Organizations Join the Open Container Initiative to Help Shape Industry Container Standards

AUSTIN, Texas, April 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- DockerCon -- The Open Container Initiative (OCI), an open source community for creating open industry standards around container formats and runtimes, today announced that Cycle.io, Dataman, and Wercker have joined the Open Container Initiative as the project inches closer to releasing version 1.0 of its runtime and image format specifications.

With the proliferation and rapid growth of container-based solutions over the past few years—including container-based solutions from almost all major IT vendors, cloud providers and emerging start-ups—the industry needed a standard on which to support container formats and runtime. The OCI was launched with the express purpose of developing standards for the container format and runtimes that provide the industry the ability to fully commit to container technologies today without the fear of lock-in.

The OCI is preparing to launch version 1.0 of its runtime and image format specifications, which will bring the industry closer to true container portability and standardization. Combined with early adoption from the Amazon Web Services, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Mesos communities (and more) and the impending availability of both v1.0 and the release of a formal certification program later this year, OCI is bridging the industry closer to standardized container distribution.

"Our community had grown rapidly over the past couple years, coinciding with an increased interest in container technology from various organizations now offering container-based solutions and tools," said Chris Aniszczyk, Executive Director of the OCI. "The project has seen contributions from 58 organizations, expanded its initial scope, and added new projects (runtime-tools and image-tools, go-digest, and selinux). None of this progress would be possible without the efforts of our growing community; to that end, we are pleased to welcome our newest members and look forward to their contributions towards container portability standards."

More about the newest members: 
Cycle.io is a new container-native CaaS (containers as a service) platform which simplifies the deployment and orchestration of containers onto bare-metal infrastructure. With features like GeoDNS, automated TLS/SSL certificate generation, git integration and more, Cycle makes it easy for developers and organizations alike to focus on development rather than infrastructure management. During Summer 2017, Cycle.io will be releasing a service which will allow developers who already maintain their own infrastructure to still experience the benefits of the Cycle platform. Petrichor, Inc., founded in 2013, is Cycle's parent company.

"As our company continues to grow, we look forward to contributing to the movement to advance container standards started by the OCI community," said Jake Warner, founder and CEO, Cycle.io.  "In a world where new technologies are appearing every day, being able to fall back to standards keeps everything moving forward. Having an open, well-designed specification will help ensure that our products and solutions will be able to integrate with things that haven't yet been built."

Dataman (Beijing Digital Technology Co., Ltd.) was founded in September of  2014. As a leading developer of open source technologies in cloud computing, Dataman provides enterprise container solutions to help traditional businesses achieve IT business transformation and better respond to business changes. Dataman's solutions are easy to use, convenient, and leverage several resources in order to maximize value and agility. Services include a lightweight PaaS platform, enabling users to quickly build and run a highly scalable production environment on cloud hosts, virtual machines and even physical machines, making the flexibility of the application extremely agile. Additional solutions include digital cloud DM/OS data center operating systems, based on leading container technologies, to help customers achieve a one-stop micro-service architecture cluster system to maximize rapid deployment of business applications in the cloud.

"We are very excited to join the OCI to help promote the development of open industry standards around container formats and runtime," said Xiao Deshi, CTO of Dataman. "An established set of open industry specifications will help us provide the  lightweight, flexible and agile solutions that our customers need in an open, accessible environment."

Wercker believes that developers should be focused on what matters most, building great products and applications. Wercker enables organisations and their development teams to achieve their CI/CD goals with microservices and Docker. This is brought to life through its container-centric and cloud native automation platform comprised of Wercker's local CLI, online SaaS solution and API.

"The promise of containers–portability, agility and interoperability–needs an established set of standards in order to succeed," said Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, CEO, Wercker. "The OCI community is helping to promote and frame a needed set of specific standards around container image format and runtime, and we're pleased to be a part of that. More value can be built on top of an open standard, so OCI implementations will make it easier for us to innovate on top of existing infrastructure without the overhead of multiple container implementations."

About the Open Container Initiative (OCI)
The Open Container Initiative is an open governance structure for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime. Projects associated to the Open Container Initiative can be found at https://github.com/opencontainers. Learn more about joining the OCI community here: https://www.opencontainers.org/community

The Open Container Initiative is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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