OCI Image - CI/CD Glossary Definition
An OCI image is a container image that follows the Open Container Initiative image specification: a manifest plus a set of content-addressable layer blobs and a config object, so any compliant runtime (Docker, containerd, Podman) can run it.
What the spec defines
The OCI image spec standardizes the image manifest, the layered filesystem (tar layers referenced by digest), and the config JSON (entrypoint, env, architecture). The companion distribution spec defines how registries serve those blobs.
In CI
Building OCI-compliant images means your CI artifacts are portable across registries and runtimes. docker buildx and buildkit produce OCI images by default, and you can request the OCI manifest format explicitly with --output type=oci.
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