The success of Docker coincided with the rise of the adoption of microservices. It is no surprise since microservices and application containers fit together naturally.
Without application containers, there was no easy and unified way to package, deploy, and maintain microservices. Even though individual companies developed some solutions to fix these problems, none was popular enough to approach being an industry standard.
Without microservices, the application containers were pretty limited. The software architecture focused on building entire systems explicitly configured for the given set of services running there. Replacing one service with another required a change of the architecture.
When brought together, application containers provide a standard way for the distribution of microservices. Each microserver comes with its own configuration embedded, so operations such as autoscaling or self-healing no longer require knowledge about an underlying application...
