The Moby Project, an open-source initiative that evolved from Docker, plans to launch three groundbreaking releases this year. This comes after a significant hiatus, with its last major release being in 2020. Notably, two contributors from Moby have shed light on this development.
The Moby Project encapsulates various components integral for constructing container-based systems. These include a container runtime, registry, build tools, orchestration mechanisms, and a suite of networking, logging, and monitoring tools. Such components pave the way for the development of microservices architectures, cloud-native applications, and container platforms.
At the recent DockerCon, Bjorn Neergaard, Moby maintainer and senior software engineer at Docker, and technical steering committee member Sebastiaan van Stijn, delved into the 2023 releases and the project’s future roadmap.
Docker realized the need to formalize specifications for container images and runtimes. Consequently, Docker’s runtime was revamped, resulting in “containerd”. The OCI (Open Container Initiative) also came into the picture, with Docker donating its specifications, enabling other platforms to implement runtimes, images, and registries.
As Docker continued to fragment its project into smaller components, the Moby Project was born. This modular approach was more accommodating to diverse needs and welcomed contributions that might not directly align with Docker’s core product. The Moby Project’s focus, however, waned, only to be revived in the past couple of years, thanks to new maintainers from organizations like Mirantis and Microsoft.
The lull post the 2020 Docker engine release saw numerous unreleased improvements. 2023 marks a shift with two major versions, 23.0 and 24.0, already out. These versions introduced:
The impending 25.0 release promises features like the Container Device Interface (CDI), OpenTelemetry integration, and enhanced health checks.
While Kubernetes dominates the orchestration scene, Docker Swarm continues to find its loyal user base. Neergaard opines that Kubernetes should be the go-to platform, barring specific use cases. The Moby Project’s future aspirations include refining the CLI, introducing multi-architecture support in containerd, and a plethora of new features and bug fixes.
In a rapidly evolving container landscape, The Moby Project is poised to make a significant impact in 2023 and beyond.