Docker to evolve the Compose Specification with the open source community as the simplest, developer-led way to define multi-container applications
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 7, 2020 – Docker, today announced that it has open sourced the Compose Specification into a standalone organization on GitHub with open governance.
Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container, cloud-native applications. Evolving the open source nature of the Compose Specification provides an open governance model in which vendors, community members and users may collaboratively innovate. This provides the wider community of existing and new users with transparency and the ability to have input into the future direction of the specification. It will also help establish a common open standard for multi-container applications that can be built and run from the desktop to the cloud.
Docker is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and others in the open source community to extend the Compose Specification to more flexibly support cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), delivering more choice to developers and accelerating how development teams build and ship multi-container applications.
Currently used by millions of developers and with over 650,000 files on GitHub, Compose has been widely embraced by developers because it is a simple cloud and orchestrator agnostic way of defining multi-container based applications. Compose dramatically simplifies the code to cloud process and toolchain for developers by allowing them to define a complex stack in a single file and run it with a single command. This eliminates the need to build and start every container manually, saving development teams valuable time.
“Booz Allen is committed to and is at the forefront of developing new open source communities for our clients. We believe the Compose Specification makes deploying complex workloads easier by streamlining the workflow in all environments and defining and configuring app services into a single YAML file, allowing our clients to deploy solutions simply and reliably,” said Nirmal Mehta, Docker Captain and Chief Technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton. “It’s incredibly exciting to see our partners Docker, AWS, and Microsoft evolve the specification for the open source community and make it even easier to build and ship multi-container, cloud-native apps.”
“The Compose Specification provides many benefits to developers and development teams, such as reduced painful developer machine setup, faster integration tests, easier code reviews and simplifying the process for quick fixes,” said Justin Graham, Vice President of Products, Docker. “Open sourcing the Compose Specification will further accelerate community adoption by enabling portability across container platforms like those from AWS and Microsoft, as well as a high-level abstraction for how the containers are built, deployed, connected and configured.”
Additional Resources for the Compose Specification Community
- For more information on the Compose Specification, visit www.compose-spec.io
- Review the Compose Specification on GitHub here https://github.com/compose-spec
- Read the Compose Specification post on Docker’s blog here: www.docker.com/blog/announcing-the-compose-specification/