The actual answer people come up with is neither of those. The process of moving your application to run in containers generally doesn't involve snapshotting To

The actual answer people come up with is neither of those. The process of moving your application to run in containers generally doesn't involve snapshotting Tom's computer - it usually wouldn't even work inside Docker for myriad reasons. And the Dockerfile format is a good way of capturing what it actually takes to reconstruct your application/environment from source in a manageable, version-control-able text file. I do agree that the rush to containerization is generally a rush to draw expansive abstraction boundaries, but this particular story isn't what people are doing. (At least not with containers - it's certainly what people were doing with VM images ten years ago!)