Fig. 3

An overview of the container-container composability experiment. We first separated and containerized different tools into different containers to mimic the situation where users do not want to edit anything inside containers to exploit existing container images. Next, we created a pipeline container (without any analysis tools installed) by using the composability of LPMX. The pipeline container is composed from existing containers (tools) as if they were installed locally in the pipeline container. Consequently, the user can download a third-party pipeline image and plug different versions of the tools used in the original image to see the difference without modifying files inside the original image; to our knowledge, LPMX is the only tool that provides us with container-container composability. All containers shared the same directory in the host to allow data access and exchange. We put the E. coli K12 and E. coli O-157 datasets into the shared folder so that all containers could access it