[chazeon]

I do computational physics and I use Snakemake. On HPCs, we only have user-level access. We are not allowed to perform long-running processes on login nodes, could be killed at any time due to a violation of rules. That said, anything that depends on Docker is a no-go; anything that uses a server-client structure we will try to avoid (although it might be possible for us to host a daemon elsewhere that we as students pay out of our own pocket). We also deal with a lot of tools that are not well-written in Python or modern languages, you wouldn't want to build any CFFI onto it.

So Snakemake, and similarly, Nextflow, suits our needs well. It is a user-space CLI tool that does not require any privileges, it optimizes for running bash command / any CLI-based tools. A bonus for Snakemake is that it uses Python and our other scripts use Python too.

So I guess DevOps tooling, which heavily bias towards docker or whatever container-based execution, is really a different space.