Maybe this isn't quite the perspective the article's taking—but damn near no one visibly wept for LXC when Docker stomped all over it in terms of “what people think containers just Are”. And now the news asks why I don't weep for them? Live by the stomp, die by the stomp.
I weep for Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails. Granted I don't really have much experience of them, I do have some experience of containers on Linux via Docker but also in constructing a minimal container runtime in C (not OCI compatible or anything), but my point is there was a lot of work in this area before Docker and especially in the case of Zones, freely available today in illumos distributions, are completely overlooked. I mean I could be completely missing something here, but Joyent for example seem to have made some really good innovations with Manta, i.e. spinning up containers to run UNIX pipeline equivalent jobs directly in the cloud on the data, but as with illumos vs Linux, Zones vs Docker and Joyent vs AWS/GCP/Azure, it seems to me a david vs goliath kind of battle, even if the tech is better.
As do I. Solaris in general and Zones in particular are so much better. There just wasn't an ecosystem around it. Solaris was too late to make the shift to open source. It might not matter; had they done so "in time" it might have killed them anyway!
LXC feels more UNIXy. Docker command line tools and formats feel awkward in that regard (which helped to popularize the thing by pushing this one specific view).
I agree. I had some VMs that I wanted to turn into containers. With LXC it was a breeze, and the result is very much like a "lightweight VM". Docker seems more like putting a single application process in a container, which is a very different thing. And if I want to do that, I'll seriously consider running the application in a unikernel (e.g. OSv) instead.
If you are trying to use docker to build lightweight VMs you are really swimming upstream. In the (docker, etc) container world they use the phrase "pets not cattle". Containers are designed to be stateless (nothing is stored in the container) and to be spun up and down as demand changes.
If you want to build a mini-VM using containers, LXC is a great choice. If you want to deploy software, easily, with CI/CD and [auto-]scaling, then containers are what you want.
