It's not an important distinction at all. A "program" isn't well-defined; it's inherently abstract. A container is a manifestation of a running program as is a

It's not an important distinction at all. A "program" isn't well-defined; it's inherently abstract. A container is a manifestation of a running program as is a Unix process; both are "runtime environments" differing in their isolation properties (Unix processes provide memory isolation, containers provide memory as well as other kinds of isolation, at least to the extent that the underlying operating system supports). > There's a lot going on between a K8s pod, a container, and the actual program. It's just not Unix-y at all. The Unix philosophy pertains to composition, not implementation. > I don't see the strawman here. You picked someone else's definition of "operating system", generalized it, and then attacked it for being too general. > K8s and containerization is frequently mischaracterized as the operating system of the future. The technical details matter and speaking in generalities is misleading (IMO). Yes, again, this is an analogy. If you interpret analogies as a guarantee that the operands are identical instead of simply "similar", you will be misled.