I used cgroups, lxc, chroots, self-extracting executables

When it comes to software it is state, not money, that is the root of all evil. Anything that I can do to constrain state mutation is worthwhile for preventing bugs. Containers are great for this, particularly if you've ever had to deal with "sysadmins" who SSH (or, more frequently in this instance, RDP) into individual application servers and manually update applications instead of using proper automation.

> Containers reduce state management. A LOT. And if you use Podman to build/run containers without root privilege, you reduce state management and avoid unwanted privilege escalation.

Years ago, this is exactly how I got my coworkers interested in containers. I never pushed for any changes to how we do things in production. All I did was start using containers to manage run-time environment on my workstation for development and testing purposes. And then my colleagues started to see how much less time I spent fussing with it compared to our more typical VM-based way of managing run-time environment. Soon enough people started asking me to help them get set up the same way, and eventually we containerized our CI pipeline too. But we never changed what was happening in production because Ops was perfectly happy with their VMs+Ansible setup and nobody had a reason to mess with it that was more cogent than "rah rah containers." Fast forward to now, though, and I feel like the benefit of containers for development has largely been undone with the adoption of Devcontainers.…

> I can always "apt-get install". I don't think you can reliably fix a specific version of a package though, meaning things will still break here the same way they did before containers.

Maybe because a single app on a single server rarely stays a single app. And while the landscape has generally improved, and imo is better under Linux than windows... there's nothing worse than trying to get a handful of .Net and Java applications installed and working in concert on a Windowss server with multiple framework versions for the differing apps. Let alone harder dependencies. Docker for Windows Containers itself was a horrible exercise in frustration just because of it's own dependency issues, and I thought it was a bad idea from the start because of it, and it dilluted Docker for Linux IMO. Docker/Containers and Compose are pretty great to work with, assuming your application has dependencies like Databases, Cache, etc. Not to mention options such as separating TLS certificate setup and termination from the application server(s) or scaling to larger orchestration options... t…