Containers have long been a popular way of packaging up and delivering software, but many developers have also begun to explore using containers in more ways than originally intended.  

In a recent episode of the SD Times podcast, What the Dev, Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, sat down with us to discuss the trends he’s been seeing and also make predictions for what’s to come. 

For example, he’s seen that developers are now using containers for cross-platform purposes, such as enabling x86 code to run on an Arm processor. 

According to McCarty, cross-platform development is normally fairly complicated because you’re not only having to develop for different systems and architecture, but your CI/CD system also needs to be on that hardware platform, or at least be able to simulate it. 

He explained that a developer that mostly works in the x86 world who is trying to develop for an Arm or RISC-V processor will need to “have some kind of simulation and or real piece of hardware that you can develop locally, put into the CICD system and test in some gold capacity or production capacity locally.” That is hard to do, so the question is can containers help with that problem?

“I’ve been through enough of these life cycles of technology that you see that almost always, if something’s very useful, we’ll bend it to our will to make it do all kinds of things it wasn’t designed to do,” he said. 

New technologies like bootc, which stands for bootable containers, are also coming into play to expand what containers can do. Essentially, bootc lets entire operating systems exist within a single container. 

“The container image has a kernel in it, but when you deploy it in production, it’s actually just a regular virtual machine, you know, or physical machine. It sort of takes the container image, converts it into a disk image, lays it down on disk and runs it. It is not a container at runtime,” McCarty said. 

He explained that once you have a bootc image running on a virtual machine, only a single command is needed to change the behavior of that virtual machine. 

“Just as easy as you could change the personality of the application you were running with Docker or Podman … it’s actually a single bootc command to basically change the personality of a physical or virtual machine … and you have a totally different server. So you can go from Fedora 39 to RHEL 10 to Debian, whatever. You can literally just change the personality. So it gives you a flexibility with pre-deployed servers that I think we have never seen before.”

McCarty also talked about how AI and ML technologies are being integrated with container technologies. He explained that in the case of artificial general intelligence (AGI), where AI is this super genius, better than any human, then AI would no longer be just software. However, for today, AI is still software, which means it’s going to need to be packaged up somehow. 

“If it’s just software, then containers are really convenient for software,” he said. “And so we know a bunch of things about it, right? Like it’s files when it’s not running, it’s processes when it is running. And the same mechanisms that we use to control files and processes, AKA containers, become very useful to AI.”

With no understood path to AGI today, McCarty believes AI should be treated as software and put in containers.

McCarty also predicts that local development of AI will become popular, citing NVIDIA’s Project DIGITS announcements as proof. NVIDIA calls Project DIGITS an “AI Supercomputer on your desk,” and McCarty said it’s essentially the equivalent of a Mac Mini with a GPU unit. 

“I think Apple’s doing a good job with their M Series processors, and actually Podman Desktop’s doing a good job of doing pass through of GPU acceleration in containers on Mac. I’d say those are all places we see as pretty exciting technologies and enablements for developers, where we see people doing AI development in containers on a laptop or desktop, and then having local acceleration. I think that combination and permutation of technologies is pretty hot. I think people want that badly. In fact, I want that.”