Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

Note: This post was originally published on the AWS Containers Blog. On March 10, 2020, we introduced Bottlerocket, a new special-purpose operating system designed for hosting Linux containers. In this post, I want to take you through some of the goals we started with, engineering choices we made along the way, and our vision for how the OS will continue to evolve in the future.