Re: Nate Amsden containers are the future
@Matt Bryant - I don't think you understand what Trevor wrote. The trend towards containers on Linux isn't just to stuff existing things into containers. It's part of a change in design towards using "microservices". Redundancy and reliability are supposed to be designed into the application system from the ground up, rather than something which is tacked onto the outside afterwards by an administrator.
As for whatever limitations you may think Solaris containers may have, that's not really relevant to this discussion because nobody is talking about Solaris in this discussion. There are containers and there are containers, and not all of them work the same. As Trevor mentioned, Virtuozzo has been around for years, and the generic Linux name for it is OpenVz which has been the mainstay of cheap web hosting for a very long time. However, the recent improvements in Linux have extended the container capabilities far beyond those earlier efforts. It's not one change or one thing, but rather the sum of many different improvements.
With regards to how containers compare to traditional VMs, because the OS kernel has a better idea of what the application is doing rather than just a very opaque "black-box" view of a traditional VM, it can constrain the application's behaviour and enforce policy on it much better. Whether or not Solaris can do this is as I said, irrelevant.
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