WWDC 2025: Containerization

[Altaic]

MacOS now supports running lightweight Linux containers. I'm still going through the docs and haven't finished watching the presentation, but this is really exciting.

Presentation: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346/
Repo: https://github.com/apple/containerization

 

[Cmaier]

Very very interesting.

 

[Altaic]

At least two of the containerization contributors seem to be from Apple Services Engineering [1]. ASE handles Private Cloud Compute among other cloud services/infrastructure, so this appears to be a serious initiative.

Serendipitously, I've got an M4 Pro Mac Mini destined to be a home server

[1] https://github.com/apple/containerization/commit/b222b947bc0ea99af00860907d5f3f852a164457

 

[Jimmyjames]

So is this similar to Docker?

 

[Altaic]

Yep!

More specifically, the apple/containerization repo is a swift library for setting up lightweight virtual machines and provides APIs to manage container images, file systems, networking, runtime environments, processes, etc.

The apple/containers repo is a CLI project for configuring, managing, and running containers, like docker. It’s built on the containerization library.

The nice thing is that it’s pretty trivial to write a GUI, integrate containers into another project, or whatever, using these repos.

I don’t envy the devs right now— GenAI and ITOps bros have descended upon them with demands. They seem to be taking it in stride, though.