The OCI Applauds containerd and rkt to CNCF

Monday, January 23, 2017 by Chris Aniszczyk

Our sister project at the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), recently announced that both Docker’s core container runtime, containerd, and CoreOS’s pod-native container engine, rkt, have been accepted by the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) as incubating projects alongside other CNCF projects Kubernetes, gRPC and more. This is great news for the entire open container ecosystem, opening the doors to shared open governance and even greater collaboration.

and of course having two healthy projects will keep everyone on their toes. Always good for the community to keep us vendors honest.
— Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) March 29, 2017

The containerd project implements the draft OCI runtime and image format specifications, and is committed to implementing these specifications as they evolve. The rkt project implements the draft OCI image spec and is committed to implementing the runtime spec as it reaches 1.0. We are pleased to share a neutral home base within the broader Linux Foundation where collaboration and iteration can happen organically.

“Our decision to contribute containerd to the CNCF closely follows months of collaboration and input from thought leaders in the Docker community,” said Solomon Hykes, founder, CTO and Chief Product Officer at Docker, in the official press release. “By donating containerd to an open foundation, we can accelerate the rate of innovation through cross-project collaboration – making the end user the ultimate benefactor of our joint efforts.”

“The OCI project is hard at work on the standards side, and we expect we will be able to share code in working with those image and runtime specifications,” said Jonathan Boulle, rkt project co-founder, CNCF TOC representative, and head of containers and Berlin site lead at CoreOS, in a recent blog post. “rkt closely tracks OCI development and has developers involved as contributors and maintainers in the specification process. rkt features early implementation support for the formats with the intention of being fully compliant once the critical 1.0 milestone is reached.”

More background on containerd joining the CNCF is available via the Docker blog and joint CNCF/Docker press release. More background on rkt can be found on GitHub, and details on rkt joining the CNCF are available here.

Interested in participating in OCI? The OCI always welcomes contributions from across the industry. Please join the OCI developer community if you’d like to contribute to the projects, or, if you’re implementing products based on OCI specifications, we recommend joining as a member and participating in the upcoming certification program.