Shipping Containers Ate The Shipping Industry

August 5, 2016

Software containers have, almost overnight, made traditional piecemeal-deployment processes obsolete in the same way as the physical shipping container did for traditional crate-based shipping.

Just because you can write and ship software without using containers, doesn’t mean you should.

Just as we don’t have to chose to use processes, it’s just how we run code on an OS, there is no longer a need to choose containers, it’s just how we do things now. That all systems will use containers in the future is certainly inevitable, it is a revolutionary way of thinking in the same way that the UNIX process model was.

Maybe your current architecture doesn’t lend itself to containerisation - your current architecture is now wrong. Maybe you are running on platform that doesn’t support containers - your platform is now obsolete. Maybe you’re just one developer hacking together something experimental on your own machine - you are only hurting you own productivity.

Container-based solutions will eat everything, and it is right that they should.