History of containers

Containers are very popular nowadays. But they are not new, they didn't come out of the blue. It's even not easy to point to an exact time when they started. As explained earlier, I don't want to give you a lesson in the facts of history, but history can give you a better understanding of the technology and even give you a clue about why or when you should use it in your organization.

So instead of focusing on an exact timeline, I'll only cover the important steps, implementations of technologies that are important to understand container technology as it is today.

Chroot environment

In Linux, there is a root filesystem, as covered in Chapter 5 , Advanced Linux Administration, and everything is mounted to that filesystem. It is the root filesystem as known as, visible to process 1 and all the child processes.

 

A process running in chroot experiences it's own root filesystem, fully separated from the system-wide root fs. chroot is often implemented to limit the impact of...