The document summarizes the history and evolution of containers over the past decade and a half. It discusses:
- The origins of containers in Unix in the 1970s-80s with chroot. Early implementations in the 2000s included FreeBSD jails and Solaris zones.
- Docker in the early 2010s popularized containers by making them easy for developers to use. This helped accelerate adoption, especially with microservices.
- Joyent developed technologies like SmartOS zones, Manta, and Triton to take advantage of containers' performance and flexibility benefits compared to VMs.
- Going forward, frameworks should be more modular like libraries to maintain flexibility. Failure handling also needs work to make distributed container