A process is any instance of a program that's being executed. That definition doesn't change whether it's a program running as an ordinary Unix process, as an I

A process is any instance of a program that's being executed. That definition doesn't change whether it's a program running as an ordinary Unix process, as an Isolate in a V8 runtime in a container on a virtual machine on a bare-metal blade in a DC rack, or as a hypothetical MIPS-like CPU on my whiteboard. By "choose your scaffolding", I'm just saying "how much of the OS kernel would you like to re-invent?" That isn't a wholly cynical position. Doing so might introduce new capabilities or cost efficiencies, which seems to be Cloudflare's pitch. But very often we get excited by the possibilities and lose sight of the tons of additional stuff now required to achieve quite simple things. In the worst case (e.g. VMware) we end up re-inventing hardware abstraction, scheduling, networking, memory management, and filesystems i.e. most of the damn kernel. Docker is a less egregious offender but still deserving of the "too much scaffolding" label. In the very best outcome, the capability gets stripped down to the core enhancement and pushed back into the expectations for a base OS, which is for example why practically every OS now comes with a hypervisor and a container mechanism.