&gt; <i>&quot;The problem is those full clones then needed to be patched.&quot;</i><p>As would the VM&#x27;s you said you ran previously. Sadly patching is one of the biggest problems in IT. Which is where tools like Puppet come into their own (which I think you did say you run?).<p>&gt; <i>&quot;The sparse zones were not usable because then you could not install or update software in isolation. I see the same thing on the ez-jail page:</i><p>&gt; &gt; <i>&quot;Because the basejail&#x27;s copy of the userland is shared by the other jails, updating the basejail automatically updates all of the other jails. Either source or binary updates can be used.&quot;</i><p>I think that&#x27;s a little deceptive. You can still install packages in the containers separate from the basejail. ez-jails would be completely useless if you couldn&#x27;t. basejail is essentially just the FreeBSD core (ie it excludes &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local).<p>&gt; <i>&quot;So, if an update to basejail breaks something, it breaks every jail linked to it? What if I want to test my software on FreeBSD+1?&quot;</i><p>Then you&#x27;d have that as a container without basejails inheritance. Nobody says you have to create every jail using the same templates (though you did earlier complain about having to patch everything in isolation :P)<p>Personally, I tend to just take a ZFS snapshot and then rollback if I ever run into issues. It&#x27;s a little lazy but works well enough for planned maintenance windows.<p>-----<p>Those arguments aside you do raise some interesting points; and I hadn&#x27;t heard of Triton either. So I&#x27;ve definitely learned something new today. I can&#x27;t really say I&#x27;ve had the same requirements to spin up and destroy new containers with the same frequency that you have, which would explain the differences between our experiences. For what it&#x27;s worth, ez-jail does have a solution to those kinds of usages via &quot;flavours&quot; (loosely like VMWare VM templates). However I suspect this might still fall a little short of your specific requirements.