I would say containers are primarily an improvement over hypervisors / VMs in performance, not over dedicated hardware. However, they still allow for some of th

I would say containers are primarily an improvement over hypervisors / VMs in performance, not over dedicated hardware. However, they still allow for some of the capabilities of VMs, in terms of elastic reshaping of a cluster. So, if you have a static environment, it's probably not useful to you. If you have a dynamic environment, where you need to frequently repurpose particular machines, but want to do it more efficiently than with a VM, it can be very useful. In another view, it's another approach to what many look to Chef, Ansible, and Puppet to do. Combined with something like Mesos or Kubernetes, you can quickly deploy to a heterogenous cluster, without a lot of install scripts running. Some of the other uses cases, such as running multiple containers simultaneously on the same hardware, make less to me.