I think in my head I had container ON A VM. Which just inherits the problem of running it on a VM. Is there a good linux tool for limiting the IO of a process or user?
Networking uses tc and disk uses the block I/O controller. https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-contr...
An additional advantage of containers is that you can start running them on top of a VM, and then migrate to bare metal later, as your infrastructure requirements evolve.