Manta allows users to spin up large numbers of transient containers around their data (i.e., without moving data around) in order to do map-reduce operations, and without having to think about the container management. Today, these compute tasks are specified as scripts that run inside a well-stocked SmartOS container, plus some optional assets to download (for custom binaries or other data). The obvious next step would be to let people specify they want to run an LX zone (rather than a SmartOS zone) so that they can run GNU/Linux binaries. Then we can consider whether it makes sense to phrase the task as a Docker image. That might well be a more natural way to incorporate a larger bunch of binaries and other shared data. Architecturally, all of this should be relatively straightforward (famous last words!).