Charliecloud vs CRI-O
Charliecloud
charliecloud.io
CRI-O
cri-o.ioSide by side
| Figure | Charliecloud | CRI-O |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.9 (#10) | 7.3 (#21) |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.0 (#12) | 7.4 (#21) |
| Installation | Charliecloud can be built from a release tarball or Git checkout and is also available through package managers including Spack and Fedora/EPEL. | The project site provides RPM and DEB installation instructions and notes Fedora packaging is available. |
| License | Charliecloud is open source software distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. | The project repository identifies its license as Apache-2.0. |
| Purpose | Charliecloud is a lightweight, fully unprivileged, open source container implementation for high performance computing applications. | CRI-O implements the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface so Kubernetes can launch and manage OCI containers. |
| Support | Users can report bugs or request features through the GitLab project and can get usage help through mailing lists and chat channels. | The project site directs users to the #crio channel on Kubernetes Slack and the project GitHub repository. |
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.