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Former Amazon engineer here. Despite the downvotes, you are making an excellent point. Amazon, among other FAANG companies, never needed containers shipping en

Former Amazon engineer here. Despite the downvotes, you are making an excellent point. Amazon, among other FAANG companies, never needed containers shipping entire bundled OSes. Deploying a "base OS" (using PXE or netboot) can be done very reliably both on a hypervisors and VMs. A simple build system can then generate traditional packages and push them into VMs allocated for a specific product. It provides better security isolation and the ability to receive security updates on OSes and also on dynamically linked libraries. Building and deploying new versions of you product is also much faster, especially at large scale: only your application package is rebuilt and deployed.

manigandham 8y ago
That's technically what companies with refined processes do by using "scratch" docker images that only contain the binaries needed for the application and nothing else. The fact that many other containers run entire OS is because it's easier to get started, or there are runtimes needed, or people just build and deploy in the same image.
- fatherlinnux 8y ago
  I agree that developed companies are doing what is described, but that is a completely separate thing than starting from scratch. People have hurriedly forgotten why Linux distros exist: https://opensource.com/article/19/2/linux-distributions-still-matter-containers https://opensource.com/article/19/2/linux-distributions-stil... Even when you write a lot of software, environments always drag in existing tools and infrastructure (aka other open source). 99% it's easier to consume pre-built SME knowledge from. Linux distro #HailTheMaintainers