Microcontainers vs Weave

Microcontainers vs Weave: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is Weave? Weave creates a virtual network that connects Docker containers deployed across multiple hosts. Weave can traverse firewalls and operate in partially connected networks. Traffic can be encrypted, allowing hosts to be connected across an untrusted network. With weave you can easily construct applications consisting of multiple containers, running anywhere.

Microcontainers and Weave can be categorized as "Container" tools.

Some of the features offered by Microcontainers are:

• 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).

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

• Virtual Ethernet Switch
• Application isolation
• Security

Microcontainers and Weave are both open source tools. It seems that Weave with 5.57K GitHub stars and 517 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Microcontainers with 1.56K GitHub stars and 137 GitHub forks.