Comment by lmm
4 months ago
> Containers (meaning Docker) happened because CGroups and namespaces were arcane and required lots of specialized knowledge to create what most of us can intuitively understand as a "sandbox".
That might be why Docker was originally implemented, but why it "happened" is because everyone wanted to deploy Python and pre-uv Python package management sucks so bad that Docker was the least bad way to do that. Even pre-kubernetes, most people using Docker weren't using it for sandboxing, they were using it as fat jars for Python.
Not only python, although python is particularly bad.
Even java things wher fatjars exist you at some point end up with os level dependencies like "and this logging thing needs to be set up, and these dirs need these rights, and this user needs to be in place" etc. Nowadays you can shove that into a container