Docker’s mission is to build tools of mass innovation. To achieve this goal, we collaborate with the best developers in the world, working with the open source projects and organizations tackling the various aspects of containerization: the Docker open source projects with more than 2,000 contributors, the Apache Software Foundation with Apache Aurora, the Linux Foundation with the MirageOS, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) collaborative projects and the Cloud Foundry foundation. It is through these collaborations that we have been able to democratize complex technologies like OS containers and orchestrators such as Docker Swarm to make them accessible to organizations of all sizes.

Last July Docker became a Founding Member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and in December, the CNCF got started with a ratified open governance structure. Today I’m excited to announce that I am joining the CNCF Technical Oversight Board (TOB) to bring users interoperable, reference stack implementations for multi-container, multi-host “cloud native” distributed applications, based on various container orchestration stacks such as Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos and Kubernetes. Because containerization is in its early days, it is too early to standardize orchestration APIs and abstractions. However, with all the innovation taking place in the container orchestration space, it is the right time to focus on the interoperability of these reference stacks.

I joined to make sure users have choice – the option to choose the reference stack that aligns with their requirements and the ability to have these solutions work with any environment – whether on prem or in the cloud. The litmus test of success for the CNCF will be that these reference stacks are truly portable and can be leveraged with all major cloud providers and the common on-premises infrastructures. Additionally because these reference stacks are leveraging components that are hosted in other organizations, it will be important that there is interoperability between the CNCF-hosted projects and projects hosted elsewhere such as Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos and non-open source technology like cloud-specific container services.

Standardization is at the heart of another Linux Foundation collaborative project, Open Container Initiative (OCI). In the OCI, we collaborate to establish a set of common, minimal standards around container technology, including container format and runtime; those are the more mature aspects of containerization that are supported by enterprise end-users, the top three cloud providers and over 40 vendors in the container ecosystem.

2016 is an exciting year as we are beginning to see collaboration efforts around containers initiated last year start to bear fruit: stay tuned for a 1.0 version of the OCI standard for container format and runtime in the next few months, and hopefully interoperable reference stacks based on Swarm, Mesos and Kubernetes from the CNCF later this year!

Learn More about Docker