Charliecloud vs containerd
Charliecloud
charliecloud.iocontainerd
containerd.ioSide by side
| Figure | Charliecloud | containerd |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.9 (#10) | 8.0 (#9) |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.0 (#12) | 8.1 (#11) |
| Purpose | Charliecloud is a lightweight, fully unprivileged, open source container implementation for high performance computing applications. | containerd is an industry-standard container runtime for managing a host’s container lifecycle, including image transfer and storage, execution, and supervision. |
| Support | Users can report bugs or request features through the GitLab project and can get usage help through mailing lists and chat channels. | Nightly builds are available for Linux and Windows, but may contain critical bugs, are not recommended for production, and receive no support. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
containerd
containerd is a free container runtime for managing a host’s container lifecycle. It handles image transfer and storage, execution, and supervision, and is designed to be embedded in a larger system rather than used directly by developers or end users. It supports OCI images and image push and pull operations, and uses runc by default while allowing other OCI-compliant runtimes. Its built-in CRI plugin can make it the container runtime for a Kubernetes cluster, and it supports registries compliant with the OCI Distribution Specification. The daemon is available for Linux and Windows. Network-interface management and image building are outside containerd’s first-class scope, so higher-level systems or tools handle those jobs. Its ctr command-line tool is intended for development and debugging, without a guarantee of a stable interface or a human-friendly experience. Users typically also need runc and CNI plugins. The plan is free; free plan available, with no free trial.