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mrbluecoatyesterday at 2:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

Great to see Apptainer getting some attention. It generally excels over other container options (like Docker and Podman) in these scenarios:

- Need to run more than one activity in a single container (this is an anti-pattern in other container technologies)

- HPC (and sometimes college) environments

- Want single-file distribution model (although doesn't support deltas)

- Cryptographically sign a SIF file without an external server

- Robust GPU support


Replies

actinium226yesterday at 3:41 PM

> Want single-file distribution model (although doesn't support deltas)

You can achieve that with docker by `docker save image-name > image-name.tar.gz` and `docker load --input image-name.tar.gz`.

It likewise doesn't support deltas but there was a link here on HN recently to something called "unregistry" which allows for doing "docker push" to deploy an image to a remote machine without a registry, and that thing does take deltas into account.

show 1 reply
colonialtoday at 4:16 AM

> (this is an anti-pattern in other container technologies)

It is? I have no issues packing my development containers full of concurrent running processes. systemd even supports running as a "container init" out of the box, so you can get something that looks very similar to a full VM.