[cmelbye]

> Are containers the new scripts?

They certainly seem to work well for that. Heroku, for example, uses containers for not just persistent processes (application servers, workers) but also short-lived processes. Tasks that run on a schedule (hourly, daily, etc.) are run by, you guessed it, starting up a container running a processes which exits when it's finished. One-off commands like maintenance scripts or REPLs work the same way.