> I've been wondering how is that fundamentally different from launching new instances via AWS/Rackspace/Google API? Is there really a fundamental difference be

> I've been wondering how is that fundamentally different from launching new instances via AWS/Rackspace/Google API? Is there really a fundamental difference between shipping a Docker container to a set of servers, or just relaunching/rebuilding servers? There's two perspectives to this: * From a user's perspective, ignoring performance implications, containers should be the same as VMs. * From a hardware perspective however, containers are much more lightweight in terms of CPU, Ram and Disk space, since they all share at least the kernel. Why should you care? Well if something is less resource consuming, it means that (a) you could run it for less than what you pay for VMs or (b) it can be sold to you for less. There's some additional benefits like fast "boots", strict decoupling of persistant and non-persistant storage (which I find an advantage, restarting a container cleans up whatever you don't care for), but at the end I think it comes down to money.