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In summary, Docker Compose is a tool for an operator to manually administer the service software lifecycle directly on destination hosts. Open Horizon is a tool for an operator to specify the conditions under which the service software lifecycle should be automatically administered autonomously on each host by the Open Horizon Agent.
Operating environment
Docker Compose is designed for Linux Hosts and requires the Docker engine runtime. It is not compatible with other container runtimes. It can operate on macOS and Windows hosts using Docker Desktop. It cannot be used to deploy containers to a Kubernetes cluster. And it will only deploy and run Docker container images.
Open Horizon is designed for Linux hosts and is compatible with both Docker and podman runtimes. It can deploy to Linux and macOS hosts using the Device Agent and to Kubernetes clusters using the Cluster Agent. It can both deploy container images to, and bi-directionally synchronize machine learning assets with, the destination device or cluster.
Dependency management at load-time versus at run-time
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