Containers and why we love them

Physical servers were the start of the computerized world we know today and are still widely used. However, running workloads on entire servers can be cumbersome and, worst, make it difficult to share resources, such as memory and CPU, among multiple processes to utilize hardware to its highest potential.

Even before the traditional servers as we know them today were created, multi-user, room-filling platforms created by the likes of IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems allowed us to scale both memory and CPU in a single environment. Processes were run with limitations on resources, which later gave way to virtualization and containers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the need for processing power increased, so did the desire to run multiple workers independently of each other, and we started to standardize the way we use hardware – in essence, abstract the hardware away and just request the resources to run a process.

In 2013, when Docker...