> Modern KVM has a comparable density to containers (except for memory)
It does, but the memory can make a big difference if you're running microservices. If I'm guesstimating I'm thinking there's probably about a 200MB difference in memory usage between a good container image and a VM. With microservices that can grow quite a bit. Let's say 4 microservices, needing at least 2 of each for redundancy, you're already looking at a difference of 1.6GB of memory. If you need to massively scale those that's .8GB of memory for every host you add, not including any efficiency gains from applications running on containers rather than VMs (which is going to be largely negligible unless we're talking a massive scale).