Vms and containers are roughly interchangable, yes, but I would argue that the tendency for vms to be treated as whole servers leads deployers to pack all of th

Vms and containers are roughly interchangable, yes, but I would argue that the tendency for vms to be treated as whole servers leads deployers to pack all of the solutions to the above problems into the vm building block. In the end there is a tightly-coupled virtual appliance and it is difficult to reuse the useful pieces. We missed the opportunity to separate these concerns and have meaningful and reusable pieces. Containers are giving us another opportunity to revisit these choices. I'm hoping we don't miss the opportunity again. I think this is a key point to bring to light, because most of the hype around using containers seems to focus on the fact that you can replace the hypervisor layer with a container manager (docker) and achieve a ton of benefit. For most use cases there isn't a significant enough difference to matter. Changing the paradigm for how applications are built and deployed is the key innovation that docker is offering us, but as you point out, there are still plenty of problems to solve in this area.