Comment by lproven
4 months ago
Money.
Containers were around for a decade or more on FreeBSD and Solaris. They let you divvy up expensive big Unix iron.
Same as VMs were around on mainframes from the late 1960s and expensive Unix RISC servers from the late 1980s.
Linux didn't need it because it was cheap. So Linux replaced that older more expensive stuff, on cheap COTS hardware: x86.
Once everything was commoditised and cost-cut, suddenly, efficiency started to matter, so VMware thrived and was copied and VMs were everywhere.
Then the low usage and inefficiency of resource sharing of VMs made them look expensive, so they started to get displaced by the cheaper easier tech of containers, making "it works on my machine, so let's ship my machine" scale to production.
Even earlier, I was introduced to the concept of containers in HP-UX Vault back in 1999, before FreeBSD and Solaris got them.
Unfortunely HPe has removed most of HP-UX documentation out of Internet so it is hard to point it out.
However there are still some digital traces,
HP-UX 10.24 release,
> This is a Virtual Vault release of HP-UX, providing enhanced security features. Virtual Vault is a compartmentalised operating system in which each file is assigned a compartment and processes only have access to files in the appropriate compartment and unlike most other UNIX systems the superuser (or root) does not have complete access to the system without following correct procedures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX
A forum discussion,
https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/hp-virtu...
Now it would be great to get back those HP-UX Vault PDFs.
Fair enough. I never worked on HP/UX. AIX, Solaris, Xenix, and VMS, OS/400, and RSTS, but never HP.
I wrote about containers being the next big thing in 2011:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/18/brief_history_o...
I credit FreeBSD and Solaris and AIX, but I think I didn't know about HP/UX.
Yeah, I got to know them by luck, years later at Nokia Networks, which was an heavy HP-UX user before transitioning into Red-Hat Linux, Vaults wasn't also not that well known.
Thanks for the article link.