It’s Complicated: Relationships Between Objects In OCI Registries

The limitations of the current OCI spec are causing people to come up with all sorts of wild hacks to connect objects in a registry. For example, tools like cosign push image signatures to the registry using a long, cryptic tag suffixed with “.sig”. There must be a better way! To solve this issue, all of the major registries have come together to form the OCI Reference Types Working Group. This group has been tasked with determining how to describe and query relationships between objects stored in an OCI registry. This means potential changes to the registry HTTP API (distribution-spec) and/or associated JSON schema (image-spec). Josh and Sajay will describe the ways in which the OCI plans to address these topics with backwards compatibility in mind. Beyond the technical details, hear about various challenges and techniques used within the working group to successfully bring people together to agree on changes to a critical spec that hasn’t been modified for years.