Common Container standards:

Past, Present & Future

 

Vincent Batts  @vbatts

$> finger $(whoami)
Login: vbatts                           Name: Vincent Batts
Directory: /home/vbatts                 Shell: /bin/bash
Such mail.
Plan:
OHMAN
$> id -Gn
devel opencontainers docker appc redhat golang slackware

So,

Why, Containers?

Single Application
Full System
But Not a VM
Except Maybe a VM
Pods of applications
Labels of services
Non-root
Desktop Applications
OMG AND CATS
But Wait,
What does "container" mean to you?

STANDARDS!

Standard

/ˈstandəd/

noun

something used as a measure, norm, or model in comparative evaluations

STANDARDS!

Areas to Standardize:
  • Packaging
  • Runtime
  • Networking
  • Cloud

Past

Packages

tar archives

*.deb or *.rpm

jar

gem

pod

module

egg

zip archives

tar archives

tar archives

tar archives

Past

*.dmg

*.msi

Runtime

Past

binaries?

ELF binaries?

WAR files

SysVinit

shell scripts

so many shell scripts

Network

Past

Hardware

shell scripts + telnet

custom

SDN

Cloud

Past

REST

SOAP

APIs of APIs

Present

Runtime

LXC

  • 2008
  • lxc specifc config

Docker

  • 2013
  • Docker specifc config and APIs

Present

Runtime

Application Container Spec (github.com/appc/spec)

  • December 2014
  • App Container Executor (ACE)
  • Several implementations, with rkt as the flagship
  • Specification

Present

Runtime

OpenContainer Runtime-Spec (github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec)

  • June 2015
  • Several Implementations, with runc as flagship
  • Specification
  • Currently v1.0.0-rc1

Present

Network

Container Networking Interface

(CNI - github.com/containernetworking/cni)

  • Used by RKT, kubernetes, Kurma, Cloud Foundry, usable with runC, and more
  • Simple to integrate with a process based workflow
  • December 2014
  • Specification

Present

Network

Container Network Model

(CNM - Docker libnetwork)

  • Used by Docker Engine
  • April 2015

Present

Packaging

  • Docker specific format

Docker Image

  • Tight coupling with daemon version
  • Signing requires Docker notary integration
  • Image naming is Docker specific and bound to registries

Present

Packaging

  • December 2014
  • A number of independent tooling

Application Container Spec (github.com/appc/spec)

  • App Container Image (ACI)
  • Addresses Fully-Qualified-Naming, image discovery, signing, content addressibility, and versioned schema

Present

Packaging

  • April 2016
  • Pulled from Docker-1.10 and Registry v2 format
  • Content addressibility

OpenContainer Image-Spec (github.com/opencontainers/image-spec)

  • Signable. Possibility to have naming and discovery.
  • Likely v1.0.0-rc1 in August 2016

Present

Cloud

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://cncf.io)

  • Kubernetes orchestration donated by Google
  • Prometheus monitoring donated
Why More Standards?!

Really great question. Thought you might ask ...


The package wars of deb vs rpm set back the broad adoption of Linux

Future

Broad consensus on v1 and forward

Portability of integrations

Perhaps, industry standards for CAS filesystems, and mapping to content publisher Fully-Qualified-Name

Call to Action!

Define your use-cases first

Ensure your container integration touchpoint stay generic,

to avoid lock-in to a particular platform.

PoC tooling for your integration

Thanks!

Vincent Batts

@vbatts| vbatts@redhat.com