OCI artifacts quietly leveled up. Over the last 18 months, they’ve gone from a niche hack to production muscle for AI/ML workloads on Kubernetes.
The signs? Clear enough: KitOps and ModelPack landed in the CNCF Sandbox.
Kubernetes 1.31 got native support for Image Volume Source.
Docker pushed Model Runner to GA—with out-of-the-box support for GGUF models.
Bigger picture: OCI registries are becoming the default nerve center for model packaging, provenance, and deployment in K8s-native ML stacks. The ecosystem’s converging there - and fast.
