Have you ever worked with a piece of software that is awfully difficult to set up? That legacy code written on FORTRAN 77, that other one that requires significant modifications to compile, or any of those that require a long-winded bash script with a thousand dependencies (which you also have to install!). Would it not be helpful if, when that red-eyed PhD student, that one that just spent three months writing up their thesis, says that they absolutely must use that server where you have installed all your stuff, you could just relocate to another one without trouble? Well, you may be able to do that now. You just need to use containerization.

The idea behind containerization is rather simple. The best way to ensure anyone can reproduce your work is to, well, ship your entire system to whomever needs to use it. You could, for example, pack up your desktop in a box, and ship it to your collaborators anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, this idea is quite unpractical, not only because of tedious logistics (ever had to deal with customs?), but also because suddenly you won’t be able to run your own pipeline. However, it is a good enough thought that at some point made a clever engineer wonder whether there was a way to ship an entire system without physically delivering the computer. And that’s exactly what they designed.