This, to me, sounds like the much more reasonable and sound approach to containers, as opposed to the "SSH bad!" article. As someone who doesn't use containers

This, to me, sounds like the much more reasonable and sound approach to containers, as opposed to the "SSH bad!" article. As someone who doesn't use containers or virtualization heavily, but maintains multiple systems (servers, desktops, phones, etc), I can unequivocally say that SSH is practically a hard requirement. And just having it as the way to get to a container seems like a no-brainer, in that you don't have to learn yet another tool, that might not work, and even if it does, won't cover all the use cases of SSH. I use SSH for remote admin and automated backups of everything (phones, tablets, servers, desktops, etc). Adding another thing to be backed up via SSH is easy, no matter if it's virtual or not. EDIT: I do really like the separation of concerns and modularity that are brought about by the approach advanced in the article. But I would argue that the arguments against SSH apply many times more strongly against alternatives to it: security upgrades? You're going to have to do that much more often with whatever you use to replace SSH. SSH has proven track record for security and authentication, it's well known, lightweight, and generally doesn't break on its own.