[justincormack]

If the issue is running out of memory before running out of CPU times, then containers wont help much, apart from to the extent that memory is overallocated with static amounts to vms. The solution is either larger memory systems, which are now much more widely available since this article was written, or using less memory for applications.

[vimes656]

Is hypervisor memory ballooning widespread in major cloud providers these days? How does it compare to bare-metal kernel memory allocation?

[justincormack]

No it is not widespread. Underprovisioning is a bit of a dirty word too - it breaks isolation.

The Google Borg paper says they use non production batch jobs to eat the spare, so you can kill them if necessary. Cloud providers could offer this as a service in theory, although they are not really architected that way.