Thinking about it i seem to recall that for a while all the hoopla was about VMs that could migrate between hardware to both better utilize existing hardware resources, and allow for more uptime.

But then a while later all the buzz was containerization, with Docker as the poster boy. This, i suspect, in that rather than have the overhead of a VM and such, you could spin up a container instance over there, take it down over here, and achieve much the same result. This in particular if the content of your VM or container was talking to a storage backend anyways.