AWS Joins the Effort to Standardize Container Technology Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), is joining forces with a number of software container industry players to bring order and standardization into this increasingly popular technology. Containerization is a way for developers to bundle their programs with all the dependencies so that they can run on different platforms. It has been called “the hottest technology” in Silicon Valley by The Wall Street Journal. Although Docker Inc. was the main force behind containerization technology, other industry efforts threatened the technology’s segmentation. Today Docker, AWS, and a host of other companies announced that they are joining forces to create the Open Container Project (OCP). This will allow for open standards and ensure interoperability. The OCP states that while there is a lot of innovation in this space, containers’ promise of portability and application portability requires the establishment if certain standards about format and runtime. “While Docker’s rapid growth has made the Docker image format a standard for many purposes, there is a lot of interest in a single container specification.” The specification will include three key characteristics:

• It will not be tied to higher-level constructs, such as a client or orchestration stack.
• It will not be closely associated with any commercial vendor or project.
• It can be used on a variety of OSes and hardware, as well as CPU architectures and public clouds.

Docker will contribute draft specs and its code to help develop cornerstone images and container runtime technologies for OCP, which will be managed under the Linux Foundation. CoreOS, another container player, was a founding member and will provide technical leadership to the OCP project. Docker will continue to work with its client and other components that use the donated technologies. Other companies and projects may also be able to do the same. Other than CoreOS, Docker, and the Linux Foundation founders include Apcera and Cisco, EMC and Fujitsu Limited. Goldman Sachs, Google and Huawei. According to the OCP, Docker-based containers were downloaded more than 500,000,000 times in the last year. This has led to more than 40,000 projects that use the Docker format. The OCP will use this technology base to create practical specifications that will be used in the industry to establish an open industry standard. It will do so using code familiar to a large developer group. Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive, stated that containers are revolutionizing computing and delivering the dream of application portability. Docker is helping to ensure that containers’ promise of modularity won’t be destroyed by the Open Container Project. All types of users, vendors, and technologists will now have the opportunity to collaborate and invent with the security that neutral open governance offers. We are grateful to Docker and the other founding members who had the vision and will to see this through. The group stated that it will be done in three months. A completed project with migrated code, and a draft specification based on donated Docker technology is expected to be ready by then.