Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback
I&#x27;ve had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing.<p>You want to run business code in a way that&#x27;s protected from other business code but also able to interact with other business code and data in a well defined way.<p>I also have this sneaking suspicion that new generations are re-inventing the wheel in a lot of ways. If you have minimal containers running on a hypervisor how is that different from processes running on an operating system? You have all these CPU provided virtualization instructions to protect guests from each other and the host from the guests but there&#x27;s no reason those instructions couldn&#x27;t have been developed to protect processes from each other. You have indirections to protect one guest from accessing another&#x27;s storage but there&#x27;s no reason processes couldn&#x27;t have the same protections (and they do in many operating systems). Why container orchestration and overlay networks instead of OS scheduling and IPC?<p>I&#x27;m sure people in academic computer science have already published many a paper about this but it feels different seeing it from inside an IT organization where people don&#x27;t seem to apply the lessons from older technologies to newer ones and we end up in this constant churn of reinvention which, as far as I can tell, is mostly a way for people, both in management and in the trenches, to keep their jobs, at least until you&#x27;re &quot;too old to learn new things&quot; and pushed aside.