balenaEngine vs Charliecloud
balenaEngine
balena.io
Charliecloud
charliecloud.ioSide by side
| Figure | balenaEngine | Charliecloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.3 (#20) | 7.9 (#10) |
| Purpose | balenaEngine is a container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. | Charliecloud is a lightweight, fully unprivileged, open source container implementation for high performance computing applications. |
Plans
In their own words
balenaEngine
balenaEngine has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Charliecloud
Charliecloud is free, open-source container software for high-performance computing on Linux. It runs containers without privileged operations or daemons by using Linux user namespaces, with minimal configuration changes on computing-center resources. Users can build images, push and pull them to registries, and use accelerators such as GPUs. Its layer-free build cache is based on Git rather than union-mount filesystems and tarballs, and Dockerfiles are parsed with a formal grammar. The ch-image tool supports registry authentication and registries including GitLab Container Registry. At runtime, ch-run can inject host resources through the Container Device Interface, including NVIDIA GPUs and Cray networking. Installation is available from a release tarball, Git checkout, Spack, or Fedora/EPEL. Charliecloud requires Linux user namespaces and has been run on x86-64, ARM, and Power; current testing covers x86_64 and ARM. It is distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project supports only the current release and provides no internal security boundary.