Thanks for the comment Jonathan. This is Kenji (I'm the founder of Spoon).

Will address a few points here and work my way down the comment thread. Unfortunately a lot of misinformation/misunderstanding in the thread.

> - Docker provides full namespace isolation between apps, another app on the same system won't affect your app. In Thinapp and others, this isn't 100% the case

Spoon provides full namespace isolation, including named kernel object segregation. When running in the containerization system, it is enabled by default and allows most applications to run independently of software installed on the host device.

> - Docker provides network isolation. Each app gets it's own private network stack this eliminates port collisions, etc. This is not the case for Thinapp, etc.

Spoon containers provide network isolation, and each container has its own configurable network stack. TCP and UDP packets can be rerouted between containers, ports, and/or the host device. Spoon also provides a built-in virtual DNS service to simplify name resolution within containers.

Sample (from the Tour off the home page):

# Launch a WordPress server, block external network connectivity
> spoon run -d --name=web --route-block=tcp,udp wordpress

# Connect a Firefox browser instance to the WordPress server and
# map the domain awesome.com to the server container's port 8080
> spoon run --link=web:awesome.com firefox http://awesome.com:8080

(You can use --route-add to add specific port+protocol mappings)

> - OS comparability is not assured, you still need to test your app on various OS's to make sure it works compared to Docker.

Still true to some extent, though Spoon has come a long way in solving this. Internally we have an inter-platform mediation layer that solves many of these issues without special work from the user. And the comparison to Docker isn't totally valid -- will Docker images work when moved between different variants of Linux? Between different hardware platforms? I'm not a Linux expert, but I'd guess you'll encounter many of the same kinds of problems (worse?) that Windows users have when moving between different flavors of Windows.

> If you are running your app inside of a clean VM on amazon, you don't care as much about isolation of namespaces, filesystem, and network - so these solutions might be viable.

Not necessarily. This is true for server applications, but untrue for cloud-hosted desktops (Azure RemoteApp, Amazon WorkSpaces, etc). In fact, it is especially problematic in the latter case since many desktop applications don't handle multi-tenancy properly at all. We called out this use case in the announcement.

> Some other comments state this is the same as VMs, it's not.

Thank you! I think there are actually a couple points of confusion:

First, there are many types of "virtualization", essentially depending on where on the execution stack the "real" vs "virtual" resource lives -- hardware (ICE), OS (what most people here are calling "VMs"), application (Spoon, App-V, ThinApp), abstract (Java VM, .NET). As Jonathan observes, Spoon VM is an application virtualization engine. It lives on top of a base OS and has very low startup times and performance overhead -- of the same order of magnitude as LXC.

Second, while Spoon's container system is built on top of Spoon VM, it is not the same thing as Spoon VM. The Windows kernel does not have an analog to LXC, so we have to provide one. This is the role played by Spoon VM. Put another way, Spoon VM fills the same role on Windows as LXC does on Linux. And in fact, LXC is in a sense a "built-in" app virtualization engine. The Spoon container implementation is analogous to Docker, providing a command-line management interface, storage system, commit points, network virtualization, scripting, hub, and so on. (In fact, there is even more to this since Spoon VM is more expressive than LXC and has to be configured to behave in specific ways to implement containerization. But this is a long and separate topic.)

So for absolute clarity, when you run a Spoon container, it is (i) running on top of the host device base OS, not running a distinct copy of an OS; (ii) has the same magnitude performance overhead as Docker+LXC, e.g. very rapid start/restart times, low incremental memory/CPU consumption, can run dozens of containers on a single box, etc.

> Anyway - Spoon's announcement doesn't go into any detail on what is new relating to what they are providing,

Untrue. The announcement specifically calls out the ability to run isolated container sessions, the container hub, network virtualization, state capture and reversion, new command-line and scripting interfaces, continuation, and -- very notably for current App-V and ThinApp users -- the ability to run installs within containers, eliminating the need for "sequencintg" (App-V), "setup capture" (ThinApp), or "snapshotting" (Spoon Studio). You better than anyone would immediately appreciate the significance of that capability.

Specific examples of all of the above are readily available in the Tour link on the home page (https://spoon.net/docs/getting-started/spoon-tour).

Better yet, stop reading this and go try it yourself. We have a little demo setup on the spoon.net home page -- click a few base images, press Run, and a container console with those images will pop-up (you will need to install the Spoon browser plugin and download the images the first time). Those on the thread "concerned" about whether Spoon is a legitimate container implementation should launch a dozen container instances and note the performance.. or just walk through the Tour samples.

I know those of you who use Windows will love the new Spoon containers.

-k

PS As I write, a user just submitted a Minecraft Server container to the Spoon Hub. Going to go check it out (https://spoon.net/hub/mwrockx/minecraft-server) and have some fun!