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Wish these sort of projects would do a better job articulating what the value proposition is over leading existing ones. Like why should I put time into learni

by Havoc 1y ago

Wish these sort of projects would do a better job articulating what the value proposition is over leading existing ones. Like why should I put time into learning this instead of rootless podman? Aside from this secret management thing it sounds like same feature set

v9v 1y ago
You should put time into learning this if you are going to be running HPC jobs on clusters, because some HPC clusters support this for jobs and not much else.
- tecleandor 1y ago
  So is this popular in science or data analysis / forecasting or something like that? I'm not familiar with it (I don't know if it changed names or just didn't notice)
  - misnome 1y ago
    Used to be called “Singularity”
  - v9v 1y ago
    I don't think people use it for reproducible environments on their own machines the same way Docker is sometimes used, I've mostly encountered it in academic compute clusters as a way to install the libraries/languages you're using onto the cluster in an easy to remove way. So it's popular in HPC clusters specifically and not really tied to a field of research beyond that.
  - elmolino89 1y ago
    Re science: yes and no. Meaning: the old way of compiling programs from sources on HPC systems while not dead is becoming rare. I can only speak about bioinformatics: the majority of programs one can get up and running in no time using either conda environments or apptainer containers. It may take few weeks for the brand new shiny version to get packaged by the maintainers, but this is seldom the problem. Even if you want to compile some program you will save yourself the time and frustration using either conda env or a container with a required toolchain/libraries. Even on a box with root access you need to avoid conflicting system wide installed library versions where program A requires lib version X and program B lib version Y.
maxnoe 1y ago
This project is way older than (rootless) podman.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  But I guess aren't their premise just the same though? I wonder how different "learning" apptainer is compared to "learning" podman given atleast in podman with podman-compose and many other such things, podman just is really equivalent to docker in a lot of scenarios with a 1:1 bind mostly
kitd 1y ago
From the Introduction [1] Many container platforms are available, but Apptainer is focused on: Verifiable reproducibility and security, using cryptographic signatures, an immutable container image format, and in-memory decryption. Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server by default. Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share. A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default. Read more about Security in Apptainer. [1] https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/introduction.html https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/introduction.html
deleted 1y ago
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by Havoc 1y ago

v9v 1y ago

You should put time into learning this if you are going to be running HPC jobs on clusters, because some HPC clusters support this for jobs and not much else.

tecleandor 1y ago
So is this popular in science or data analysis / forecasting or something like that? I'm not familiar with it (I don't know if it changed names or just didn't notice)
- misnome 1y ago
  Used to be called “Singularity”
- v9v 1y ago
  I don't think people use it for reproducible environments on their own machines the same way Docker is sometimes used, I've mostly encountered it in academic compute clusters as a way to install the libraries/languages you're using onto the cluster in an easy to remove way. So it's popular in HPC clusters specifically and not really tied to a field of research beyond that.
- elmolino89 1y ago
  Re science: yes and no. Meaning: the old way of compiling programs from sources on HPC systems while not dead is becoming rare. I can only speak about bioinformatics: the majority of programs one can get up and running in no time using either conda environments or apptainer containers. It may take few weeks for the brand new shiny version to get packaged by the maintainers, but this is seldom the problem. Even if you want to compile some program you will save yourself the time and frustration using either conda env or a container with a required toolchain/libraries. Even on a box with root access you need to avoid conflicting system wide installed library versions where program A requires lib version X and program B lib version Y.

maxnoe 1y ago

This project is way older than (rootless) podman.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
But I guess aren't their premise just the same though? I wonder how different "learning" apptainer is compared to "learning" podman given atleast in podman with podman-compose and many other such things, podman just is really equivalent to docker in a lot of scenarios with a 1:1 bind mostly

kitd 1y ago

From the Introduction [1] Many container platforms are available, but Apptainer is focused on: Verifiable reproducibility and security, using cryptographic signatures, an immutable container image format, and in-memory decryption. Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server by default. Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share. A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default. Read more about Security in Apptainer. [1] https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/introduction.html https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/introduction.html

deleted 1y ago

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