Containers is the current buzzword in terms of application development and cloud computing and has been ever since Docker achieved notoriety about a year and a half ago. We've reported on containers previously and predicted that end users will also benefit from this new free technology. In this article, I'll explore how things might look in time.

Some readers might remember the first appearance of the free VirtualBox hypervisor in 2007 that made Linux distribution testing easier. Previously, there was the VMware Player, but VMware is not free and there was the constant problem of update breaking and having to wait for the latest kernel patch to make things work again.

With VirtualBox and help from DKMS [1] such problems are a thing of the past, and ISO images of the newest distribution can be prepared for testing in a matter of minutes. The only limitation to the number of simultaneously bootable distributions is main memory and processor speed. Here, container solutions can make headway with end users, because their resource superstructure is much less resource-hungry than that of hypervisors. Hundreds of containers can theoretically share the same host kernel. Containers virtualize at the operating system level, whereas with hypervisors this happens on hardware.

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