Today, the container landscape is rather crowded and Docker is not the predominant player anymore.
The goal of this ticket is to present different products and/or projects and/or vendors that are part of the containers landscape and classify them using the existing standards.
For this classification, I will use the standards from Open Container Initiative (OCI) and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Open Container Initiative
The goal of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) is to promote a set of common, minimal, open standards and specifications around container technology more precisely container formats and runtime. At the moment of this writing it offers the following standards:
The goal of the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is to drive the adoption of cloud-native technologies (Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure) by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. In the specific case of containers, we will focus on the Container Runtime Interface (CRI).
If you wonder if there is any link between OCI and CNCF, the answer is that both initiatives are operating under the Linux Foundation umbrella, the OCI focusing only on the container formats and runtime.
OCI Image Specification
The image specification defines the structure of an OCI Image which should contain a manifest, an image index (optional), a set of filesystem layers, and a configuration. The goal of this specification is to enable the creation of interoperable tools for building, transporting, and preparing a container image to run.
In order to see the content of an OCI image the following command could be used (for a nginx image in this example):
On the tooling side here are a few tools that are able to generate OCI compliant images and this list is far from being exhaustive:
Kaniko – tool to build container images from a Dockerfile, inside a container or Kubernetes cluster. Kaniko doesn’t depend on a Docker daemon and executes each command within a Dockerfile completely in userspace. This enables building container images in environments that can’t easily or securely run a Docker daemon, such as a standard Kubernetes cluster. The tool was created by Google.
Jib – tool to build Docker and OCI images for your Java applications without a Docker daemon. It is available as plugins for Maven and Gradle and as a Java library. The tool was created by Google.
Buildah – tool to build OCI images from a Dockerfile that is daemonless and rootless. It is also capable to generate a pod file from one or more images and also mimics the execution of a pod.
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