Open Container Initiative

The Open Container Initiative is an open governance structure for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtimes.

Established in June 2015 by Docker and other leaders in the container industry, the OCI currently contains three specifications: the Runtime Specification (runtime-spec), the Image Specification (image-spec) and the Distribution Specification (distribution-spec). The Runtime Specification outlines how to run a “filesystem bundle” that is unpacked on disk. At a high-level an OCI implementation would download an OCI Image then unpack that image into an OCI Runtime filesystem bundle. At this point the OCI Runtime Bundle would be run by an OCI Runtime.