The first half of this chapter will cover how open standards encourage a diverse ecosystem of container implementations. We'll look at the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and its mission to provide an open container specification as well. The second half of this chapter will cover the various operating systems available for running containerized workloads, such as CoreOS. We'll also look at its advantages as a host OS, including performance and support for various container implementations. Additionally, we'll take a brief look at the Tectonic Enterprise offering from CoreOS. We'll look at the various hosted platforms offered by the major cloud service providers (CSPs) and see how they stack up.

This chapter will discuss the following topics:

• Why do standards matter?
• The OCI and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• Container specifications versus implementations
• Various container-oriented operating systems
• Tectonic
• The CSP platforms available that can run Kubernetes workloads