DEVOPSdigest

Docker 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.

“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, VP 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.”