Containers won on ergonomics and spent the decade paying for the boundary they gave up. The answer that arrived in 2018 was a smaller virtual machine rather than a stronger container: tens of thousands of lines of Rust, a boot measured in milliseconds and a device model with almost nothing in it.
Three waves in fifteen years: virtualise the machine, abstract the machine away, schedule against a pool. Each one solved the last one's problem and quietly introduced a subtler one.
Control groups shipped in Linux 2.6.24 in January 2008 and spent six years as plumbing almost nobody touched. The v2 rework is already under way now that containers have made the subsystem famous.
Docker hit 1.0 last week. What is spreading is a packaging format and a registry rather than a new isolation primitive; cgroups and namespaces have been in the kernel for years. The distinction matters, because the isolation we have just traded away is going to have to come back.
