Come on... ping was obviously chosen as a ludicrously simple example. You'd never containerize ping. But you could imagine some simple user application that wou

Come on... ping was obviously chosen as a ludicrously simple example. You'd never containerize ping. But you could imagine some simple user application that would be easily deployed as a container, but that would be horrible overkill to wrap in a virtual machine. You're right that once you've hit rack levels of virtualization, you've already hit the management overhead requirements to use VMs. In my mind, it isn't about processing or IO overhead. It's about the overhead for management. It's a trade-off. Some applications are better managed as whole systems (VMs), whereas others are more building block-ish and probably better as containers. The two technologies are pretty complimentary.