So, ever since Docker came out there has been lots of people talking about containerization and how to best achieve the overall goals for making applicaitons into containers to run anywhere. The vision of building the apps and making these portable little nuggets of golden apps. What started happening is all these little hacks started going into the Dockerfile to make the app do specific things for the targeted app environment. Application developers found themselves copying and pasting different lines from other Dockerfiles and tweaking them to meet their needs. Its becoming a bit of a mess, but luckily there are a couple initiatives trying to solve the problem.

Containers and Builds

First off, is Open Containers that is trying to standardize the idea of a container and what that means as a resource to run in any type of environment. Lots of big companies are behind it and it has some spinoff projects.

On of the spin off projects will help application developers quite a bit, its called Buildpacks which for any developer that has used Heroku they will be familiar with the concept. The buildpack is defined for a given application type / language build that will result in an OCI or Open Container image. This image is used to run the application in an IAAS or other type of environment.

On going

Second, as part of trying to organize the industry the Cloud Native Foundation create a way to find new ways to improve the infrastructure of running applications as a whole. These can be found at the CNF Landscape site, gives you pointers to the above projects and the initatives that are starting.