“While its [Docker] use (superficially) resembles that of virtual machines, it is much more lightweight as it operates at the level of a single process (rather than an emulation of an entire OS layer). This also allows it to start almost instantly, require very little resources and hence permits an order of magnitude more deployments per host than a virtual machine”
Dirk Eddelbuettel on RevolutionAnalytics.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke of the potential to use containers for OSS distributions. Clearly the advantages that Dirk speaks of above are essential for a next generation of OSS that has to deal with web-scale, elastic resource allocation and the touchpoint explosion. His article (and the contained links – no pun intended) are worth a read.