Sylabs shakes the palm

During the recent session at RStor last December during the 29th IT Press Tour, we had the privilege to spend time with Gregory Kurtzer, the CEO of Sylabs, an alternative container player. Greg is also the creator of CentOS and Warewulf projects.

Sylabs delivers the dream of every IT admin to run any application anywhere and anywhere means private or public clouds or edfe and event IoT platforms. Even if de facto standards exist such Docker, Sylabs changes the packaging and modify paradigm with Singularity.

Open source with a Community edition, Singularity becomes the container of choice for HPC, EPC/AI (Enterprise Performance Computing) and Cyber Security thanks to an huge installed base, millions of cores running and support of GPUs, key component in scientific and technical computing. The product spans enterprise, research labs, clouds and universities, and it also boosts GPUs enterprise penetration, it is faster than Docker, more simple and above all it is universal.

Designed with security, mobility and performance in mind, Singularity has 2 differences:

1. the presence of a runtime engine with OCI compatibility and work it Kubernetes, Mesos, Kubeflow and Nomad.
2. the container format, aka Singularity Image Format or SIF, with only 1 signed, immutable and encrypted file.

The security is also a key advantage in favor of Singularity if you compare with Docker. There is no root owned demon process and containers don't run as root.

As AI, Data Analytics and HPC become more and more common within the enterprise, meaning that players like Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, HPE, Dell or NVidia leverage pSingularity to be platform agnostic, minimize risk and reach larger audience.

In addition to the Singularity Community edition, the company has developed different flavors: SingularityPRO, Singularity Cloud and Singularity Enterprise. The Pro offers subscription, licensing, professional services and support. The Cloud flavor, in alpha today with plan to be GA in February, provides a container library, build services, keystore and a devops platform that ties all these pieces together. The Enterprise edition groups the PRO and the Cloud to run on-premises.

Sylabs plans to offer also SyOS, a thin micro-OS appliance to secure and control containers on any x86, ARM and GPU platforms, and DCM aka Distributed Container Management for on-prem, cloud edge and IoT deployments. Both of them should be released soon probably in February or March.

A real good surprise met a few weeks ago and we'll follow closely this story and it is very compelling and shakes market established positions.