Comment by bostik

I honestly think that Dockerfile was the biggest driver. Containers as a technology are useful, for the many reasons outlined in this thread. But what Dockerfiles achieved was to make the technology accessible to much wider and much less technically deep audience. The syntax is easy to follow, the vocabulary available for the DSL is limited, and the results are immediately usable.

Oh, and the layer caching made iterative development with _very_ rapid cycles possible. That lowered the bar for entry and raised the floor for everyone to get going easier.

But back to Dockerfiles. The configuration language used made it possible for anyone[tm] to build a container image, to ship a container image and to run the container. Fire-and-forget style. (Operating the things in practice and at any scale was left as an exercise for the reader.)

And because Anyone[tm] could do it, pretty much anyone did. For good and ill alike.