It's basically leaning on shitty software engineering to produce increased reliability in release engineering/operations. The old model was a system would be r

It's basically leaning on shitty software engineering to produce increased reliability in release engineering/operations. The old model was a system would be running, and a lot of software components within that system would depend on each other, creating a web of dependencies. If one of the dependencies had a problem, it could bring down the whole system [in theory]. The new model is "simpler" in that every software component has its own independent operating environment, with [supposedly] no dependency on the others. In this way, if one dependency fails, it can do so independent of the system at large - the failed piece is simply replaced by a different, identical piece. In addition, the component environments don't store state or anything else that would be necessary in order to replace it. We basically bloat up our RAM and waste CPU and disk space in order to be able to understand and support the system in a more abstract way, in the service of better availability, and also, better scalability. How is this different from simply running a bunch of chroot'ed services on a system without containers? It really isn't. But you get more control over the software by adding things like namespaces and control groups, and by everyone using the same containers, more uniformity. By dealing with the annoyance of abstractions and bloat, we get more human-friendly interoperability.