docs: initial proposal for OCI artifact registry

Partially addresses kubeflow/community#682

Signed-off-by: Ramkumar Chinchani <[email protected]>

Author: Ramkumar Chinchani

docs/oci-registry.md

@@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
+# OCI Registry as a Kubeflow Model Registry
+
+## Authors
+
+- Ramkumar Chinchani (Cisco)
+- _TBD_
+
+## Maintainers
+
+- Ramkumar Chinchani (Cisco)
+- _TBD_
+
+## Motivation
+
+According to the [Kubeflow 2023
+survey](https://blog.kubeflow.org/kubeflow-user-survey-2023/), 44% of users
+identified Model Registry as one of the big gaps in the user’s ML Lifecycle
+missing from the Kubeflow offering. 
+
+![Kubeflow survey](diagrams/model-registry-kubeflowsurvey.png "Kubeflow survey")
+
+## Solution Overview
+
+[Open Container Initiative](https://opencontainers.org/) is a sibling (to CNCF)
+organization under [The Linux Foundation](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/)
+which has the container
+[runtime](https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec),
+[image](https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec) and
+[distribution](https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec)
+specifications under its purvey which are vendor-neutral contracts that the Kubernetes
+ecosystem relies on for running, filesystem layout, and pushing and pulling of
+container images.
+
+However, recent developments in the OCI, specifically
+[_image_](https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/releases/tag/v1.1.0) and
+[_distribution_](https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec/releases/tag/v1.1.0)
+spec **v1.1.0**, have included support for pushing arbitrary artifacts along
+with support for relationships between artifacts.
+
+## OCI v1.1.0 Conformant Registries
+
+The following are the highlights about OCI artifact registries.
+
+- Container images: these represent workloads and have been the traditional use case for an OCI conformant registry.
+
+- Artifacts: these represent arbitrary data (ML model data or additional
+  metadata in this context) that can also be pushed and pulled from an OCI
+  conformant registry.
+
+- Content-addressable: all data is organized as a Merkle DAG with sha256 hashed
+  blobs. This bodes well for reproducibility.
+
+- Versioning: apart from the sha256 hash, all data can be tagged with a human-readable version.
+
+- Annotations: there is provision to append arbitrary annotations to any artifact.
+
+- References: an artifact can now be pushed along with a reference to another
+  artifact (via the `Subject` field) which can be leveraged to address the data
+  lineage use case.
+
+
+## References
+
+_TBD_
+