[rossmohax]

I believe, that success of containers is not because of lightweightness or other isolation properties of them.

Containers won dev mindshare because of ease packaging and distribution of the artifacts. Somehow it is Docker, not VM vendors came up with a standard for packaging, distributing and indexing for glorified tarballs and it quickly picked up.

[throwaway894345]

> Somehow it is Docker, not VM vendors came up with a standard for packaging, distributing and indexing for glorified tarballs and it quickly picked up.

IMO the important, catalyzing difference is that Docker containers have a standard interface for logging, monitoring, process management, etc which allow us to just think in terms of “the app” rather than the app plus the SSH daemon, log exfiltration, host metrics daemon, etc. In other words, Docker got the abstraction right: I only care about the app, not all of the ceremony required to run my app in a VM. These common interfaces allow orchestration tools to provide more value: they aren’t just scheduling VMs, they’re also managing your log exfiltration, your process management, your SSH connection, your metrics, etc, and all of those things are configurable in the same declarative format rather than configuring them with some fragile Ansible playbook that requires you to understand each of the daemons it is configuring, possibly including their unique configuration file/filesystem conventions and syntaxes.

[aequitas]

> Somehow it is Docker, not VM vendors came up with a standard for packaging, distributing and indexing for glorified tarballs and it quickly picked up.

Packaged VM's existed for a while already with thing like Vagrant on top, there was also already LXC which leaned more into the VM concept. Where Docker made the difference imho is with Dockerfiles and the layered/cached build steps.

[enw]

> glorified tarballs

Calling container images glorified tarballs is like calling cars glorified lawnmowers.

[brazzy]

Um...a container image is very literally and exactly a collection of tarballs and some JSON files with metadata.

[kjeetgill]

Maybe closer to calling a 16-wheeler a glorified minivan. I think there's something meaningful in that comparison.