I can't get my head around docker, and LXC is so much easier to understand. It's a lightweight VM, administered traditionally. It's easy!

There There! I think the same way. I feel like LXC is super powerful and flexible at the same time. Docker and all its terminology around(docker file, compose, swarm and many more) just feels like unnecessary complexity.. A few unixy scripts to automate LXC commands and The infrastructure should be set. The less wheels to grease the better at this level.

I think the point of Docker (and maybe Kubernetes) is that its containers are intended to be stateless one-offs, so they aren't (and can't be) managed like a traditional server. Instead of patching a server, you'd build a new image incorporating said patches and launch that in place of the old one. It's not a bad tool for scalable services that can be stateless (i.e., not databases or file servers), even if I personally haven't quite gotten the hang of that workflow yet.

It took off like crazy for VPS hosting, until superceded (although I know of many that still use it).

OpenVZ was popular enough to support the parent company Virtuozzo/Parallels/SWSoft (many name changes over the years) and the commercial Virtuozzo product is still sold: www.virtuozzo.com .

The lack of OpenVZ being accepted into the kernel, is what eventually killed it IMHO. Since the cgroups and other code that underlies Docker/LXC etc. is in every kernel, it was only a matter of time until the default became accepted and then used widely.

I think that's a lesson of history and market share. It takes combining all the right circumstances for something to really take off. Still blows my mind that *bsd isn't used more often.

My only guess is that, like everything, Microsoft beats it for the reasons MS beats anything: legalese.

I'm not sure how Microsoft has anything to do with the subthread of comments you are responding to.

For many companies software choice is all about who's behind whatever. I.e. They want an outside entity bound to the service in a legal contract. I think that's a huge reason Microsoft owns the corporate IT sphere and why red hat/ubuntu have some standing while *bsd not so much.