Startups Help Guide the Future of Container Technology through the Open Container Initiative

TORONTO, Canada, ContainerCon – August 23, 2016 ​– The Open Container Initiative (OCI), an open source project for creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime, today announced that Anchore, ContainerShip, EasyStack and Replicated have joined The Linux Foundation and the Open Container Initiative.

Today’s enterprises demand portable, agile and interoperable developer and sysadmin tools. The OCI was launched with the express purpose of developing standards for the container format and runtime that will give everyone the ability to fully commit to container technologies today without worrying that their current choice of infrastructure, cloud provider or DevOps tool will lock them in. Their choices can instead be guided by choosing the best tools for the applications they are building.

“The rapid growth and interest in container technology over the past few years has led to the emergence of a new ecosystem of startups offering container-based solutions and tools,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Executive Director of the OCI. “We are very excited to welcome these new members as we work to develop standards that will aid container portability.”

The OCI currently has nearly 50 members. Anchore, ContainerShip, EasyStack and Replicated join existing members including: Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Apprenda, AT&T, ClusterHQ, Cisco, CoreOS, Datera, Dell, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Infoblox, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Kyup, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Midokura, Nutanix, Odin, Oracle, Pivotal, Polyverse, Portworx, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, Resin.io, Scalock, Sysdig, SUSE, Twistlock, Twitter, Univa, Verizon Labs, VMware and Weaveworks.

More about the new members 

Container adoption is accelerating, but with speed comes risk. With Anchore, users can create a trusted standard for their containers that is predictable and protectable, with development, operations and security teams on the same page from the start. Anchore democratizes certification and empowers users to secure their containers, so they can deploy them with confidence. Anchore, Inc. was founded by enterprise veterans, Saïd Ziouani and Dan Nurmi. The company is headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“Formal specifications will allow us to ensure that the containers which our customers have certified using Anchore’s tools will be interoperable and compatible across multiple platforms and container runtimes,” said Saïd Ziouani, chief executive officer and founder of Anchore. “We are very excited to join the OCI and help further the development of open industry standards around container formats and runtime.”

ContainerShip is a hosting platform that makes it incredibly simple for developers to build, scale and manage their web infrastructure using containers. ContainerShip allows developers to launch PaaS-like hosting environments on demand, and provides a pipeline for doing continuous deployment. Teams and individuals get a single pane of glass to manage their entire application and infrastructure lifecycle, while running in any cloud or private data center.

“By joining the OCI, we’re able to provide input and help guide the direction of container specifications,” said Phil Dougherty, co-founder of ContainerShip. “We are excited to be a part of a community that is passionate about container technology and its potential for application portability.”

EasyStack Inc. is a trusted leader as an OpenStack platform and service provider in Asia-Pacific. The company was founded by some of the earliest OpenStack contributors from IBM China Lab in February 2014. The company provides an open, stable, reliable, high-performance and elastic cloud platform to enterprise customers based on OpenStack with a focus on customers in finance, telecommunications, government, electronics, education and manufacturing industries, among others.

“We adhere to an open source philosophy and regularly contribute to core community projects,” said Xilun Chen, founder of EasyStack. “We look forward to working with the OCI community to build a container ecosystem around shared industry standards.”

Replicated is a container-centric platform that enables SaaS companies to manage and distribute an enterprise, installable version of their product on-prem (behind the firewall and into their customers’ private data centers or private clouds). Replicated merges the concepts of cloud deployment with an on-prem delivery model while providing key enterprise functionality for identity management (LDAP, AD), audit logging, licensing, reporting and much more. Currently, the Replicated platform powers the enterprise versions for great companies including Travis CI, NPM, Sysdig, CircleCI, CodeClimate, Waffle.io and several others.

“We’ve built a solution that enables SaaS developers to ship the same code to both cloud and on-prem installations,” said Marc Campbell, Founder and CTO of Replicated. “Having standards around containers is important for our business because it allows us to run the containers built by different tools on almost any distribution of Linux.”

About the Open Container Initiative (OCI)

The Open Container Initiative is an open governance structure for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime. Projects associated to the Open Container Initiative can be found at https://github.com/opencontainers. Learn more about joining the OCI community here: https://www.opencontainers.org/community

The Open Container Initiative is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at  www.linuxfoundation.org.

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