Dirk Eddelbuettel, Charlotte Van Petegem, Noam Ross, Colin Fay, Jacqueline Nolis, Nan Xiao, Hong Ooi, Mark Edmondson, Jason Williams, Ellis Hughes, Lori Shepherd, Péter Sólymos, Tyson L. Swetnam, Lars Kjeldgaard, Sean Lopp, Karthik Ram, Ben Marwick, Craig Willis, Heather Nolis, Gergely Daróczi, Nitesh Turaga, Robrecht Cannoodt, Dav Clark, Dom Bennett, and Daniel Nüst
The Rocker Project provides widely used Docker images for R across different application scenarios. This article surveys downstream projects that build upon the Rocker Project images and presents the current state of R packages for managing Docker images and controlling containers. These use cases cover diverse topics such as package development, reproducible research, collaborative work, cloud-based data processing, and production deployment of services. The variety of applications demonstrates the power of the Rocker Project specifically and containerisation in general. Across the diverse ways to use containers, we identified common themes: reproducible environments, scalability and efficiency, and portability across clouds. We conclude that the current growth and diversification of use cases is likely to continue its positive impact, but see the need for consolidating the Rockerverse ecosystem of packages, developing common practices for applications, and exploring alternative containerisation software., Source code for article available at https://github.com/nuest/rockerverse-paper/ Updated version includes some new paragraphs and corrections throughout the text; full diff available at https://github.com/nuest/rockerverse-paper/compare/preprint.v2...preprint.v3