I don't know about repeating patterns, what I see with containers is sort of novel but has its roots in competition between time sharing systems and transaction

I don't know about repeating patterns, what I see with containers is sort of novel but has its roots in competition between time sharing systems and transaction processing systems. I've never used Multics but it seems that the guys who wrote unix and VMS and other mini computer OS were time sharers. One box, lots of users, how do we stop users from stomping on one another. The final paradigm was that your programs can pretend they own the whole machine and the operating system handles keeping everybody safe from one another. This is fine if everybody runs single programs but eventually hits the wall when you need competing environments. Personal computers and networking fixed that, but now I want to share my running program, I need a server again. A big, shared machine only my environment clashes with yours, so containers are born. They are networked personal computers in conception. The other pattern is transaction programming. IBM mainframes didn't really do time sharing, you write up your job and schedule it. Some jobs are then triggered by conditions or events. Its more like a domino stack than processes trying to pretend they are the only thing running. AWS lambda functions are the modern equivalent but without the safety of proper queues that something like CICS provided. They will get there. For some problems, you need interactivity. For others, you really want transaction processing. I think transaction processing is really underutilised in modern systems as we all scramble just to make stuff work and the time sharing and personal computer modes of thinking dominate the problem space.