Sylabs is one of “The 10 Hottest Container Startups Of 2018.” In making this selection, CRN states:
These 10 container startups are driving innovation and delivering enterprise-ready solutions for deploying cloud-native applications at massive scale.
Singularity containers were developed originally in a US public-sector lab. Sylabs is positioned to drive commercial adoption within the enterprise, as their needs were previously underserved by existing offerings. CRN’s acknowledgment, along with its other nine choices within this category, underscores the importance of containerization within the enterprise. In the case of Sylabs, the emphasis is on compute-driven workloads, as noted in the CRN selection:
Sylabs sees an opportunity to expand use of the container engine to new types of computationally intensive applications that require containers to enable portability, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
CRN senior editor Joseph Tsidulko emphasizes that “… the industry has largely standardized on the Kubernetes orchestration platform first developed at Google.” Indeed, eight of the ten container startups recognized by CRN incorporate a Kubernetes play into their offerings. Just yesterday, Sylabs articulated integration of Singularity containers with Kubernetes by announcing a new open source project. By emphasizing runtime and image services, Singularity CRI (Container Runtime Interface) delivers a native interface for Singularity containers within the Kubernetes orchestration platform. A proof-of-concept implementation has been released, and is already being received warmly by the communities engaged with Singularity, Kubernetes, and beyond.
The selection of Sylabs within this category was based upon SingularityPRO. In addition to integration with Kubernetes, an alpha-stage preview of Sylabs Cloud has appeared since the startup was reviewed by CRN. This Singularity centric cloud portal enables key signing and verification, hosted containers, and remote builds.
By selecting these ten startups, CRN affirms that secure, mobile, flexible, and scalable containerization solutions are where savvy “… startups are making their mark by focusing on narrower challenges that arise for specific types of customers and use cases.” Sylabs congratulates the nine other startups selected by CRN in this category.
In addition to this hot-startup designation from CRN, Singularity has recently received accolades from both the readers and editors of HPCwire.
Singularity is well established in HPC, and actively bridging the gap between it and Enterprise Performance Computing (EPC). The opportunity cost of taking Singularity for a test drive could hardly be lower, as ready-to-run containers already exist for numerous use cases. If simple, fast, secure, and compatible containers factor into your plans, we encourage you to start here.
