Huawei Becomes the First Asian General Maintainer in the OCI Community

Huawei was recently elected as a maintainer of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image-spec project, following the OCI runc, OCI runtime-spec, OCI image-tools, and OCI runtime-tools projects. This makes Huawei the first Asian vendor to ever occupy a maintainer’s seat in all important projects in the OCI community. This role demonstrates a widespread acknowledgement of Huawei’s continuous contribution to the OCI community, specifically to Huawei’s strong influence in the container field.

OCI is an open source organization under the Linux Foundation and is dedicated to promoting standardization of container standards, including container runtime and container image. Its purpose is to support container portability across different implementations and to accelerate adoption and innovation of cloud-native applications. OCI is already highly respected and widely used in the cloud-native field.

Huawei joined OCI as a founding member and has been contributing ever since, including developing the OCI standard V1.0 and related tools, defining the container image format, improving the standard image validation method, and optimizing the image use tool. Huawei has made great contributions in promoting implementation of the image standard, OCI V1.0, which has been well received by mainstream container vendors since its release in July 2017. Currently, Huawei has devoted itself to development of the next version of OCI, which focuses on OCI image discovery.

There is no standard concerning image discovery, so image providers cannot find a uniform and secure image proxy service platform. This limits the number of images available to users, and also impedes innovation of image providers. To solve this problem, Huawei initiates the OCI-Discovery project. The project defines a complete set of resource proxy service protocols, allowing users to discover the address of image resources using the proxy service. Users can then obtain complete images from the image repository based on the distribution protocols of image providers. In addition to defining standards, the OCI-Discovery project develops codes for proxy services to provide reference for developers.

’’Rapid development of cloud-native applications drives more and more customers to build container services based on OCI’’, commented Jiang Xiaoli, General Manager of Huawei’s Basic Cloud Service & AI Service Ecosystem. ’’Adhering to the strategy of basing on open source, introducing enhancements to open source, and making contributions to open source, Huawei will devote more efforts into the OCI Community and carry out joint innovations with its partners. Together, we can promote commercial utilization of the community’s innovations and enable successful digital transformation of customers"