Containers march into the mainstream

When Edison invented the lightbulb, it had a problem: It needed to be hardwired to the lamp. Hence the Edison screw, which became the standard that, to this day, allows almost any bulb to be twisted into almost any light fixture, be it desk lamp or chandelier.

A decade ago, Solomon Hykes’ invention of Docker containers had an analogous effect: With a dab of packaging, any Linux app could plug into any Docker container on any Linux OS, no fussy installation required. Better yet, multiple containerized apps could plug into a single instance of the OS, with each app safely isolated from the other, talking only to the OS through the Docker API.

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