[derefr]

Linux had "containers" for years before Google's work, vis. Virtuozzo's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ.

OpenVZ's containers—and they were containers, in every sense of the word—were already secure; what they weren't was implemented by a set of granular, reusable in-kernel primitives that served any goals other than that of "containerization." Instead, OpenVZ was a very "cathedral"-esque approach to Linux containerization: just one big blob of code with a complex API surface. Thus, the kernel refused to upstream it.

Google's contribution was mainly to clone the feature-set of OpenVZ by working on a series of small enhancements (to cgroups and kernel namespaces) that would each be a useful standalone feature, but would also coincidentally be composable to replicate the power of an OpenVZ container. In other words, to create an OpenVZ alternative that was mergeable.

(Side-note: although Virtuozzo is recently a standalone company, for most of its life it was a brand owned by Parallels. If anyone is to "blame" for Linux containerization becoming a thing everyone was interested in, it's probably them.)