What Google pioneered was the idea of defining how to build a bunch of containers, building them, deploying them together to a cloud, and then having them talk to each other according to preset rules.
Yes, we had chroot, jails, and VMs long before. I'd point to IBM's 360 model 67 which was released in 1967 as the earliest example that I'm aware of. A typical use before containerazation was shared hosting. But people thought of and managed those as servers. Maybe servers with some scripting, but still servers.
I'm not aware of anyone prior to Google treating them as disposable units that were built and deployed at scale according to automated rules. There is a significant mind shift from "let's give you a pretend server" to, "let's stand up a service in an automated way by deploying it with its dependency as a pretend server that you network together as needed". And another one still to, "And let's create a network operating system to manage all services across all of our data centers." And another one still to standardize on a practices that let any data center can go down at any time with no service disruption, and any 2 can go down with no bigger problems than increased latency.
Google standardized all of that years before I heard "containerization" whispered by anyone outside of Google.
Yes, we had chroot, jails, and VMs long before. I'd point to IBM's 360 model 67 which was released in 1967 as the earliest example that I'm aware of. A typical use before containerazation was shared hosting. But people thought of and managed those as servers. Maybe servers with some scripting, but still servers.
I'm not aware of anyone prior to Google treating them as disposable units that were built and deployed at scale according to automated rules. There is a significant mind shift from "let's give you a pretend server" to, "let's stand up a service in an automated way by deploying it with its dependency as a pretend server that you network together as needed". And another one still to, "And let's create a network operating system to manage all services across all of our data centers." And another one still to standardize on a practices that let any data center can go down at any time with no service disruption, and any 2 can go down with no bigger problems than increased latency.
Google standardized all of that years before I heard "containerization" whispered by anyone outside of Google.