Containers won for one reason: they simulate a statically compiled binary that’s ergonomic for engineers and transparent to the application. A Docker image is a glorified tarball with metadata in a JSON document.
From Joseph’s comment on “Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but from a developer’s perspective it makes sense. It may not be incidental that the new programming languages of the 2010s (e.g. Go, Rust, Zig) produce statically linked binaries by default.
I always thought of containers as a way to add standardized interfaces to an application/binary that can be configured in a common way (e.g. ports, data directories, configurationenv vars, grouping and isolation). The only other ecosystem that does this and maybe even goes a little further is Nix.
Because the binary format itself is ossified and the ecosystem fragmented enough we missed the train for advanced lifecycle hooks for applications (think multiple entry points for starting, pausing, resuming, stopping, reacting to events, etc. like on Android, iOS, MacOS) … in Linux this is something that’s again bolted on from the outside: with e.g. D-Bus, Systemd, CRIU).