Helios vs Microcontainers: What are the differences?

Helios: Docker container orchestration platform, by Spotify. Helios is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet of servers. Helios provides a HTTP API as well as a command-line client to interact with servers running your containers; Microcontainers: Tiny, Portable Docker Containers. A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more. Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.

Helios and Microcontainers belong to "Container Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Helios are:

• Helios is pragmatic.
• Helios fits into the way you already do ops.
• Hihgly scalable

On the other hand, Microcontainers provides the following key features:

• Size — MicroContainers are small. As shown above, without changing any code the image is 22 times smaller than a typical image.
• Fast/Easy Distribution — Because the size is so much smaller, it’s much quicker to download the image from a Docker registry (eg: Docker Hub) and therefore it can be distributed to different machines much quicker.
• Improved Security — Less code/less programs in the container means less attack surface. And, the base OS can be more secure (more below).

Helios and Microcontainers are both open source tools. Helios with 2K GitHub stars and 229 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Microcontainers with 1.56K GitHub stars and 137 GitHub forks.