An Opportunity to Deliver True Container Interoperability

Intel announced that it is one of the founding members of the Open Container Project (OCP), an effort focused on ensuring a foundation of interoperability across container environments. We were joined by industry leaders including Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Joyent, Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware in the formation of this group which will be established under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.  This formation represents an enormous opportunity for the industry to “get interoperability right” at a critical point of maturation of container use within cloud environments.

Why is this goal important?  We know the tax limited interoperability represents to workload portability and the limiter it represents to enterprises extracting the full value of the hybrid cloud.  We also know the challenge of true interoperability when it is not established in early phases of technology maturity.  This is why container interoperability is an important part of Intel’s broader strategy for open cloud software innovation and enterprise readiness and why we are excited to be joining other industry leaders in OCP.

Intel brings decades of experience in working on open, industry standard efforts to our work with OCP, and we have reason to be bullish about the opportunity for OCP to deliver to its goals.  We have the right players assembled to lead this program forward and the right commitments from vendors to contribute code and runtime to the effort.  We’re looking forward to helping to lead this organization to rapid delivery to its goals and plan to use what we learn in OCP towards our broader engagements in container collaboration.

Our broader goal is squarely focused on delivery of containers that are fully optimized for Intel platforms and ready for enterprise environments as well as acceleration of easy to deploy container based solutions to the market.  You may have seen our earlier announcement of collaboration with CoreOS on optimization of their Tectonic cloud software environment with Intel architecture to ensure enterprise capabilities.  This announcement also features work with leading solutions providers such as SuperMicro and RedApt on delivery of ready to deploy solutions at Tectonic GA.  At DockerCon this week, we are highlighting our engineering work to optimize Docker containers for Intel Cloud Integrity Technology extending workload attestation from VM based workloads to containers.  These are two examples of our broader efforts to ready containers for the enterprise and highlight the importance of the work of OCP.

If you are engaged in the cloud software arena, I encourage you to consider participation in OCP.  If you’re an enterprise considering integration of containers in your environment the news of OCP should provide confidence of portability of future container based workloads and that evaluation of container solutions should be considered as part of your IT strategy.