DOC: Show very simple usage and benchmark against continuum/miniconda3

[corneliusroemer]

I was asked why I prefer micromamba-docker over continuum/miniconda3.

Miniconda shows this very simple command on their readme, i love it:

docker run -i -t -p 8888:8888 continuumio/miniconda3 /bin/bash -c "\
    conda install jupyter -y --quiet && \
    mkdir -p /opt/notebooks && \
    jupyter notebook \
    --notebook-dir=/opt/notebooks --ip='*' --port=8888 \
    --no-browser --allow-root"

No need for dockerfile, just run this snippet.

Among the advantages for micromamba are:

• much smaller image
• wide variety of base images (alpine, ubuntu, cuda, ...)
• no annoying default base environment
• no annoying default channels

I tested speed, and indeed it is! I think you could add this to the docs to show a) how simple it is to use the container, and b) that it is more performant than miniconda

Micromamba:

docker run -i -t mambaorg/micromamba /bin/bash -c "\
    time micromamba install -yn base -c bioconda -c conda-forge python=3.10 nextclade -y --quiet && bash"

real    0m9.570s
user    0m9.574s
sys     0m3.865s

docker run -i -t -p 8888:8888 continuumio/miniconda3 /bin/bash -c "\
    time conda install -yn base -c bioconda -c conda-forge python=3.10 nextclade -y --quiet && bash"

real    0m22.089s
user    0m14.953s
sys     0m3.726s

In addition this, the pull time is of course much shorter for micromamba (20 seconds for miniconda on 100Mbps, vs 3 seconds for micromamba)

[wholtz]

Yes, we could do a better job of showing the performance advantages. Would you be up for making a documentation pull request?

[corneliusroemer]

I'm really sorry but I'm already procrastinating too much 🙃 I can't commit to doing it, happy for you to reuse whatever I've written above without need to attribute (other than mention in PR)

Here's the jupyter example translated to work with micromamba-docker:

docker run -i -t -p 8888:8888 mambaorg/micromamba /bin/bash -c "\
    micromamba install jupyter -n base -y --quiet -c conda-forge&& \
    mkdir -p notebooks && \ 
    jupyter notebook \
    --notebook-dir=notebooks --ip='*' --port=8888 \
    --no-browser --allow-root"