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Comment by anderspitman

6 years ago

If you've never used Singularity containers[0], I highly recommend checking them out. They make a very different set of tradeoffs compared to Docker, which can be a nice fit for some uses. Here's a few of my favorites:

* Images are just files. You can copy them around (or archive them) like any other file. Docker's layer system is cool but brings a lot of complexity with it.

* You can build them from Docker images (it'll even pull them directly from Dockerhub).

* Containers are immutable by default.

* No daemon. The runtime is just an executable.

* No elevated permissions needed for running.

* Easy to pipe stdin/stout through a container like any other executable.

[0]: https://github.com/hpcng/singularity

> * Images are just files. You can copy them around (or archive them) like any other file

Never heard of Singularity before, and it does look interesting. Wanted to point out though that you can create tarballs of Docker images, copy them around, and load them into a Docker instance. This is really common for air-gapped deployments.