I am one of the authors behind that guide. That guide does not assume that you're running "a bunch of processes" or "even a full system" in the container. Even

I am one of the authors behind that guide. That guide does not assume that you're running "a bunch of processes" or "even a full system" in the container. Even if you're only running 1 process, it's still highly relevant. The main point is the Unix process model and how zombie processes work. Things are just not setup properly if your system doesn't handle that properly. And except by using specialized apps (e.g. the my_init system used in baseimage-docker), it just isn't set up properly. One of the Docker authors, shykes, stated: "In short, regular applications don't expect to be pid 1, and generally speaking they shouldn't." The other point is to be able to login to the container to perform one-off sysadmin and debugging work. There was lxc-attach for that, but now that Docker supports multiple backends, SSH is the only portable solution that works no matter which Docker backend you use.