OCP will end the battle for the standard format of the container industry, a disruptive industry

Editor's note: The English version of this article is from VentureBeat, the Chinese version is compiled by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder. When Docker-led containers are sweeping the globe, the battle for container standards has never come to a stop when the original application development and release methods are being subverted. And the standard of the Battle of the war without smoke has brought a huge waste of the user does not have any meaning, then it is very necessary to have a unified standard out of the unified lakes and rivers, end this senseless war. At this time, the OCP was born ...

These few weeks have been a happy day for the container and the Internet software industry. At the Dockercon conference in late June, Docker and other communities released a lot of very interesting news.
One of the most important news should be the announcement of the "Open Container Project (OCP)", which was led by Docker and CoreOS, and started to create an open container format standard.

The process of establishing a standard is tedious, at least for most people. But without a unified standard, the war of standards will bring about extreme damage to the new industry of containers. You may recall the recent competition for standard Blu-ray vs. High Definition DVD formats for DVD standards. The major video producers compete on DVD standards, and consumers are sidelines to watch them, instead of blindly buying a supported format that is not sure whether it will be a standard product (if you wait a few more years, maybe they will wait until today's video streaming media.) As for streaming media, this is another story.)

Ben Golub, chief executive of Docker, has made an analogy to describe the waste of this format-standard battle: It's like the battle for the width of train tracks. Rather than the endless track of how wide the standard is, we might as well (sit down to unify a standard) focus on how to build a better engine.

That's why the OCP can be born. Here is a more detailed description of the OCP standard.

OCP Details

The purpose of the OCP presence is to create an "open container format" standard. The format here includes the container image format and the runtime environment.

Docker has contributed their Libcontainer project to the OCP organization and renamed it Runc, which lays the technical foundation for the OCP. The "Application Container" project from CoreOS, APPC, will also be a large part of the new OCP format. APPC is often known for its Rkt format (RKT is the implementation standard for APPC). "I believe many of the core concepts from APPC will be part of the new OCP standard," according to CoreOS's familiar executive, Alex Polvi. “

The OCP is a project run under the support of the Linux Foundation, and at the time of writing, 21 members have been added (including the founding members of the project, including CoreOS, AWS, Google, Redhat, VMware, EMC, Huawei ).

What does the OCP really mean?

The OCP is an exciting news for us in 3 main areas.

First, establish a standard for the container format as early as possible, so that users are less likely to be trapped by container providers because of differences in the details of the technology or tools underlying the implementation. If you have the experience of switching from an Android phone to an Apple phone (or vice versa), it must be repugnant to the standard of both power supply and data line, because they do not adopt a uniform open standard, so one side of the data line and power is not used on the other side.

Second, reducing the provider's blockade can bring immediate visible benefits to the user. As we said earlier, the standard dispute will make consumers hesitate to buy the product before the operator makes a technical decision. If the standard is set down, we don't have to wander around. So that users can quickly apply the relevant technology, the enterprise to take the technology can also accelerate the indomitable of the development of their own products, without waiting for a large competitor to stand on the same starting point to start moving forward.

Finally, the appearance of the OCP will accelerate the creation of tools around the container. Otherwise, if the standard dispute continues, tool developers will be as likely to wander as consumers about which standard dilemma to choose. And ultimately determine who is the ultimate winner of the analysis process is very time-consuming and expensive, here because of the wait and spend more than an hour, it means that you will be an hour late to provide users with solutions to solve their pain points, then it means that more competitors will appear. If the developer does not see clearly which side will be the winner of the standard fight, he is often forced to support different formats. As a tool developer myself, I was delighted with the appearance of the OCP.

A kindly reminder

The appearance of the OCP is really good news, but that doesn't mean that all the problems are solved.

There is also a dark side to this open standard: the covert operations and senseless complex struggles that arise between members as a result of their own interests and in the process of establishing the standard. As competitors Docker and CoreOS followed the founders of the OCP with 19 other members, it would mean that the entire standard would be filled with a gun rhetoric, and that disagreements over standards for their own sake would only slow down the process of standard-setting, There are even attempts to change the direction of the entire standard setting to suit their own interests.

Take OpenStack for example, although it has developed rapidly and solved the user's real pain point, but it can not escape the above mentioned problems. The result of OpenStack is that it is more complicated than it should be, and ultimately comes at a cost to the extent of user adoption. In my opinion, avoiding too much complexity is critical to the new standard of OCP.

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OCP will end the battle for the standard format of the container industry, a disruptive industry