A core result of the OCI effort is the creation and development of the overarching container specification. The specification has five core principles that all containers should follow, which I will briefly paraphrase:

• The container must have standard operations to create, start, and stop containers across all implementations.
• The container must be content-agnostic, which means that type of application inside the container does not alter the standard operations or publishing of the container itself.
• The container must be infrastructure-agnostic as well. Portability is paramount; therefore, the container must be able to operate just as easily in GCE as in your company's data center or on a developer's laptop.

• A container must also be designed for automation, which allows us to automate across the build, as well as for updates and the deployment pipelines. While this rule is a bit vague, the container implementation should not require onerous manual steps for creation and release.
• Finally, the implementation must support industrial-grade delivery. Once again, this means speaking to the build and deployment pipelines and requiring streamlined efficiency in the portability and transit of the containers between infrastructure and deployment tiers.

The specification also defines core principles for container formats and runtimes. You can read more about the specifications on the open containers GitHub page at https://github.com/opencontainers/specs.

While the core specification can be a bit abstract, the runc implementation is a concrete example of the OCI specs, in the form of a container runtime and image format. Again, you can read more of the technical details on GitHub at https://github.com/opencontainers/runc.

The backing format and runtime for a variety of popular container tools is runc. It was donated to OCI by Docker and was created from the same plumbing work used in the Docker platform. Since its release, it has received a welcome uptake by numerous projects.

Even the popular open source PaaS Cloud Foundry announced that it will use runc in Garden. Garden provides the containerization plumbing for Diego, which acts as an orchestration layer similar to Kubernetes.

The rkt implementation was originally based on the appc specification. The appc specification was actually an earlier attempt by the folks at CoreOS to form a common specification around containerization. Now that CoreOS is participating in OCI, they are working to help merge the appc specification into OCI; this should result in a higher level of compatibility across the container ecosystem.