Comment by alexey-salmin
4 months ago
The article seems to assume that containers appeared to solve the software distribution problem and then somehow got repurposed into virtualization, isolation and management of production services. I think this view is very far from truth.
The virtualization/isolation aspect came first, the SWSoft Virtuozzo was doing that quite well in early 2000s. They even had [some] IO isolation which I think took around a decade to support elsewhere. Then gradually pieces of Virtuozzo/OpenVZ reached the mainline in a form of cgroups/LXC and the whole thing slowly brewed for a while until the Docker added the two missing pieces: the fast image rebuilds and the out-of-the-box user experience.
Docker of course was the revolution, but by then sufficiently advanced companies have been already using containers for isolation for a full decade.
I remember hearing about all the support from Intel for "0-cost" virtualization at the hardware level way before I heard about containers. From what I remember it was mostly to speed up virtual machines (VMWare stuff). It was a massive market differentiator for Intel in the server space.
I vaguely remember having to turn on some features in VirtualBox at the time to speed up my VMs, it was a massive uplift in performance if you had a CPU that supported it.
I believe BSD Jails created a "Why don't we have this under Linux" feeling as well.
To my knowledge the very first appearance was the "ctx" kernel patches project by linux-vserver.org by Herbert Pötzl et al. https://web.archive.org/web/20250307173707/http://linux-vser... (sadly, the domain seems to be expired just recently)
I used it heavily back in the days, long before kernel namespaces went upstream and docker became a thing.