Containers Are Not the Future
I&#x27;ve been saying for years that containers are nothing more than an ugly hack to get around the fact that OSes are broken. More specifically modern OSes still carry 1980s assumptions about multi-tenancy, system administration, application management, state management, etc.<p>In the 1980s a &quot;server&quot; was a big expensive special snowflake. Each server had a &quot;system administrator.&quot; The system administrator would &quot;install&quot; software &quot;on&quot; the machine.<p>I quoted all those words to highlight no longer valid concepts.<p>Boxes are ephemeral now. Systems have more than one administrator, sometimes belonging to a different organization or department. Applications are not installed &quot;on&quot; the system in the sense that they root into it and modify its state. If they do this makes them a terrible hassle to manage. Applications should be ephemeral things that can float freely between machines and store their state in some kind of distributed or remote data store or database, or at least can be easily migrated between hosts. Everything is mobile. Everything is commodity. Everything is liquid.<p>OSes are just not designed this way, so we have an ugly hack  called a container that basically amounts to &quot;let&#x27;s tar up images of operating systems and just treat them like giant static binaries.&quot; Onto this is bolted a whole array of other ugly hacks to make that easy to deal with, but the concept is fundamentally ugly as hell.