The Open Container Initiative (OCI), an open source community for creating open industry standards around containers, today announced that 99Cloud, Kontena and OpenStack Foundation have joined the Open Container Initiative at the Silver level.

As the application container market is poised to reach $2.7 billion by 2020, increased interoperability and open standards for containers have become vital.

"As development and container adoption continues to skyrocket, the ecosystem's health depends on living industry specifications to assure the interoperability of container implementations," said Chris Aniszczyk, Executive Director of the OCI. "99Cloud, Kontena and OpenStack Foundation are welcome additions to OCI - we look forward to their help in stabilizing and evolving our container runtime and image specifications with the OCI collaborative community."

To harness this momentum, the OCI Technical Oversight Board (TOB) just elected five new board members to each serve a two-year term to push the technical project forward: Taylor Brown (Microsoft), Stephen Day (Docker), Phil Estes (IBM), Jon Johnson (Google) and Mrunal Patel (Red Hat). These new members join the following existing members: Vincent Batts (Red Hat), Michael Crosby (Docker), Vishnu Kannan (Google) and Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux Foundation). The TOB also voted to elect Michael Crosby (Docker) as the new Chair. This new TOB lineup is responsible for adding, removing or reorganizing OCI projects. To learn more, follow the TOB on GitHub here.

More about the newest members:
99Cloud, founded in 2012, is China's leading professional OpenStack service provider - bringing Google-like datacenter technology to China. It is an active member of The Linux Foundation and CNCF, and ranked as a Top 10 contributor to OpenStack Community code worldwide.

"It's our great honor to become an OCI member and have this opportunity to join the container standards community," said Chun Zhang, CEO of 99Cloud. "We look forward to helping shape OCI's formats and runtime, along with enthusiastically contributing to the open source community, as we're committed to the development of open container technologies."

Kontena provides easy-to-use, fully integrated solutions for DevOps and software development teams to deploy, run, monitor and operate containers on the cloud for some of the biggest enterprises in the world. Kontena plans to take an active part in drafting the OCI specifications and charters while actively promoting OCI to its user base - incorporating the runtime spec into the Kontena Platform open source project via runC and containerd.

"We are excited to become a member of the Open Container Initiative," said Miska Kaipiainen, CEO and co-founder, Kontena. "We have always believed in and been part of the open source community and feel that OCI plays a very important role in keeping the container ecosystem open and progressive."

OpenStack Foundation is an open source foundation dedicated to open infrastructure. Kata Containers is a new container infrastructure project managed by OpenStack Foundation which merges technology from Intel Clear Containers and Hyper RunV. The community is working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. Kata Containers is designed to be architecture agnostic, run on multiple hypervisors and be compatible with the OCI specification for containers and CRI for Kubernetes. Additionally, there is a team packaging OpenStack cloud services as OCI compliant images.

"OCI plays an important role in bringing the container ecosystem together and driving common formats across tools and deployments," said Lauren Sell, VP at the OpenStack Foundation. "The OpenStack Foundation is excited to support OCI specs, through the Kata Containers and OpenStack projects, and looks forward to working more closely with the OCI community to drive the future of container image standardization."