I would say docker's real innovation was the introduction of reproducibility to system software at the OS-level. Or, it was a vote of no-confidence in the old

I would say docker's real innovation was the introduction of reproducibility to system software at the OS-level. Or, it was a vote of no-confidence in the old way of patching/upgrading/deploying/building software. Or, static linking won. The Linux features like cgroups/overlayfs etc that were used to deliver reproducibility at an acceptable performance cost are more of an implementation detail than the actual innovation, imo. I think one of the co-founders of docker might agree [1]. [1]: https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225 https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225