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
> (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.
> 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.