United States – October 12, 2026 -- Sylabs will end-of-life SingularityPRO, Singularity Enterprise and SingularityCE on October 25, 2026, the date its engineering work on the SingularityCE project and Singularity ecosystem stops. CIQ, which backs the competing Apptainer project, says it is already moving to absorb Singularity's user base.
Sylabs releases formerly commercial features as open source
Sylabs is closing out SingularityPRO and Singularity Enterprise by open-sourcing functionality previously reserved for those paid offerings. CIQ expects the Apptainer community to pick up and maintain those features.
Singularity's 2015 HPC origins lead to a split in 2021
Gregory Kurtzer started Singularity at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2015 for multi-user HPC clusters, where Docker's security model did not fit. He founded Sylabs in 2017 to develop it commercially.
In 2021, the open source project joined the Linux Foundation as Apptainer. Dave Dykstra of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has led it since, with community contributors including CIQ. Sylabs kept developing SingularityCE and its commercial products separately.
Apptainer keeps the singularity command and SIF image support
Apptainer still provides the singularity command for backwards compatibility and runs the same SIF images, so current users can switch without changing workflows. CIQ distributes Apptainer, including within its Warewulf Pro cluster management offering.
CIQ opens Apptainer Pro early-customer program
CIQ announced Apptainer Pro, a commercial layer on open source Apptainer. It will add long-term support releases, preflight compatibility checks, execution records and cluster image distribution. CIQ is taking early customers now, with priority for organizations migrating from Singularity. Wider availability is expected soon.