Docker terms of service

[alansill]

We have been contacted by a sales representative for Docker saying that the terms of service have changed and their products are now free only for classroom use and instruction. We're not sure what effects this will have on our cluster or on the ability of researchers to prepare or use Docker containers. Do you have any insight or experience?

[dirkpetersen]

@alansill , I think one of the most common practices today is to have users run existing docker containers using AppTainer/Singularity on HPC and keep one or more shared machines with a docker registry to allow them to make docker containers which are then imported/run by AppTainer/Singularity on the cluster nodes. That is not too expensive even if yo have to pay for a single machine. If users really want docker on every HPC node I would install Podman which comes with RHEL9 anyway and is already tested and users may not even notice as the familiar docker commands would just continue to work.

[alansill]

Thanks. Just worried about licensing issues. It's worrying that the new "public sector" sales reps are coming at us with language that implies Docker products are only free for classroom use, and Podman, being a Red Hat product, has the same concerns.

[dirkpetersen]

With Red Hat you can only get charged for the RHEL distribution but not for individual components such as Podman. So to use Podman for free you just need to switch to Rocky Linux