> As a concept, containers never really lived up to their potential. "A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that

> As a concept, containers never really lived up to their potential. "A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application." As long as that application runs in linux. I like the concept of containers as a lightweight alternative to virtualization. I even use containers (FreeBSD Jails, specifically) for some particular use-cases where I need stronger isolation than separate UIDs, but don't need a full-blown VM. I don't mind this use-case at all. I really dislike the reality of containers which seem to be "Our deployment procedure and dependencies are so insane so there is no hope of packaging this as an RPM or DEB, so here's an entire userland for you". As an example of papering over a crazy deployment/dependencies nightmare: I remember seeing a project[0] which used four Docker containers to apply some machine learning based automation to Hue lights. Two of the containers are basically infrastructure pieces (RabbitMQ and Cassandra), one container was dedicated to the machine learning piece and one acts to tie the other three together. I have no idea why this project needs to run four separate operating system instances to do this job. If I were building it I'd do it as one application, so no need for RabbitMQ, and I'd use an ORM to let the user choose which database is most suited. I'd have an SQLite database as a reasonable default. Maybe I'd have an option to publish stuff to some kind of message queue so that it could be consumed by other systems. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea behind this project and want to try it out, but it really feels like the author went container-crazy because they could and didn't stop to think about whether they should. [0] https://github.com/tlackemann/hubert https://github.com/tlackemann/hubert