OCP will end the competition for the container industry, a disruptive industry's standard format.

OCP will end the competition for the container industry, a disruptive industry's standard format.

Editor's note: the English version of this article is from VentureBeat, which is compiled by the Tiandi Zhuhai sub-rudder. The competition for container standards never stops when Docker-headed containers are sweeping around the world and the original application development and release methods are revolutionized. The competition for standards, the war without smoke, has brought about a huge waste that has no significance to users. At this moment, we need a unified standard to unite the rivers and lakes and end this meaningless war. At this time, OCP came into being...

These weeks are a great day for the container and Internet software industries. At the DockerCon Conference in late June, Docker and other Communities published a lot of interesting news.
The most important news was published by Docker and CoreOS, and an open container format standard "Open container Project (OCP)" was established.

A standard establishment process is very boring, at least for most people. However, without a uniform standard, the Battle of standards will bring extreme damage to the emerging industry of container. You may remember a recent competition about the DVD standard Blu-ray vs. High definition DVD format standards. Major video producers cannot compete in the competition for DVD standards, while consumers are still watching the changes from the ground to the ground, instead of blindly buying a supported format, you cannot determine whether it will become a standard product. (If you wait a few more years, they may wait until the emergence of streaming media. As for streaming media, this is another story)

Ben Golub, chief executive of Docker, used an analogy to describe the waste caused by the competition for standard formats: this is like the battle for width standards of train tracks. Rather than endlessly making it impossible to develop standards for a wide track, we should focus on how to build a better engine.

This is why OCP was born. The following is a more detailed description of the OCP standard.

OCP details

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

Docker contributed their libcontainer project to the OCP organization and renamed it runC, which laid the technical foundation for OCP. The "application container" project from CoreOS, APPC, will also form a large part of the new OCP format. APPC is often known to the world because of its rkt format (rkt is the Implementation Standard of APPC ). According to Alex Polvi, a familiar executive of CoreOS, "I believe that many core concepts from APPC will become part of the new OCP standard. "

OCP is a program run with the support of the Linux Foundation. At the time of writing this article, 21 members have joined (The project founding members include CoreOS, AWS, Google, Redhat, VMware, EMC,).

What Does OCP actually mean?

The reason why OCP is an exciting message for us is mainly reflected in three main aspects.

First, establish a standard for the container format as soon as possible, so that the user is unlikely to be blocked by the container provider because of the differences in the underlying implementation details of the technology or tool. If you have been switching from an Android phone to an Apple phone (and vice versa), the power supply and data cable standards of the two are definitely not uniform, because they have not adopted a unified open standard, therefore, the data lines and power supply of one party cannot be used by the other party.

Secondly, reducing the provider's blocking will bring immediate and visible benefits to users. As we mentioned above, the standard competition will make consumers hesitate to purchase related products before the operator makes technical decisions. If the standards are set, you don't have to wait and see. So that users can quickly apply related technologies. Enterprises Adopting this technology can also accelerate the development of their own products, instead, you don't have to wait until a bunch of competitors are on the same starting line as yourself to start moving forward.

Finally, the emergence of OCP will accelerate the generation of tools around containers. Otherwise, if the competition for standards continues, tool developers and consumers will be stuck in the dilemma of which standard to choose. The final analysis process of determining who is the final winner is very time-consuming and expensive. Here, the waiting process consumes more than one hour, it means that you will provide users with solutions to solve their pain points one hour later, which means more competitors will appear. If developers do not know which party will eventually be the winner of the standard competition, they are often forced to support different formats. As a tool developer, I am very happy with the appearance of OCP.

Kindly reminder

The appearance of OCP is indeed good news, but it does not mean that all problems have been solved.

There will also be a dark side of this open standard: The hidden box operations and meaningless complex struggles between Members during the establishment of this standard due to their respective interests. As competitors Docker and CoreOS followed 19 other members to join the ranks of the founders of OCP, it means that the entire standard establishment process will be filled with the battle of the old saying, for the sake of their respective interests, the division of standards will only slow down the establishment of standards, and some may even try to change the direction of the entire establishment of standards to cater to their own interests.

Take OpenStack for example. Although it has achieved rapid development and solved the real pain points of users, it still cannot escape the problems mentioned above. The OpenStack result is more complex than the original one, and the final result is a price for user adoption. In my opinion, avoiding being too complex is crucial for the new OCP standard.

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