Open Container Initiative Is an Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come!

by Kraettli Lawrence Epperson in Explorations of the Inevitable

The Open Containers Initiative announced (Community Rallies Behind Open Container Initiative) in late July that 14 new companies had joined the initiative and that Docker had donated their base container format as a starting point for the standard. Supporters of the initiative include AT&T, Oracle, Twitter, Verizon, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware, among others.

That’s a mouthful, but why should you care? Because this represents a major advancement in cloud computing and is very exciting news for anyone who is a fan of web application development, building SaaS or other types of web-based companies, and who values and supports open standards.It is an advancement that I’ve been awaiting for 3 or 4 years – an inevitable development that couldn’t come soon enough – and should put to rest a lot of enterprise fears about migration to cloud-based infrastructure.

So, what is OCI and why does it matter? One of the big problems with most of the cloud-based hosting solutions on the market today, and many VPS solutions as well, is “lock-in.” Lock-in is when you, as a user and buyer, cannot migrate your application or virtual machine from one hosting provider to another because their virtual machine format is proprietary. If you do want to migrate, you are forced to re-build your entire application environment on the new host, including migrating your databases, platform, frameworks, code, etc. and then re-configuring all of it to work on the new host. Portable container standards like Docker, Rocket and others allow you to bundle your application into a lightweight container that has everything needed to run the app and that is completely host agnostic. All OCI hosts – or Docker hosts – provide the same hosting platform and infrastructure, allowing you to

As someone who’s been involved in building dozens of online applications, platform configuration was always a huge issue and cost center. It has to be right, it took time, resources and expertise, and has mission critical. Now, with portable app containers, you can do live copies from server to server and host to host, and accomplish seamless migrations, clones, clusters and hot failover servers across continents with the touch of a very few buttons. It makes a huge difference in the overhead, reliability, portability, customer service and competitiveness.

Check it out and learn more here: Open Container Initiative

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Kraettli Lawrence Epperson

Managing Director at JumpPhase Ventures
This blog is dedicated to providing advice, tools and encouragement from one entrepreneur to another. I want to keep this practical and accessible for the new entrepreneur while also providing enough sophistication and depth to prove useful to the successful serial entrepreneur. My target rests somewhere between the garage and the board room, where the work gets done and the hockey stick emerges.