You’ve always been able to run containers on a variety of operating systems: Zones on Solaris; Jails on BSD; Docker on Linux and now Windows Server; OpenVZ on Linux, and so on. As Docker in particular and containers in general explode in popularity, operating system companies are taking a different tack. They’re now arguing that to make the most of containers you need a skinny operating system to go with them.
>Why? (Besides giving them a new revenue stream?)
Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, the first Linux company to seize on the idea of a lightweight, container-friendly Linux, explained: “We think we can make the operating system effectively irrelevant.”