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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I think it is widespread because containers are (seemingly) marketed as being some kind of magic. The impression I get is that the benefit to containers is that you don't have to think about them. This may be more a product of Docker but I think containers and Docker have become synonymous.

I'm not sure this is a fair comparison but that is my impression. I could be in a bubble too.

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I’d like to think so too. It’s hard to actually understand how Docker works by reading their documentation.

Everything looks so simple.. and it magically runs on macOS and Windows too. No wonder people think it’s some sort of a VM.

Technically, containers running on MacOS and Windows are a (Linux) VM, under the hood. Now, Microsoft put in a lot of work to support something like namespaces in the Windows kernel, so that it's now possible to run "Windows-native containers" for Windows software. But both Windows and MacOS still use a Linux VM under the hood to run Linux containers. That being said, I'm not familiar with the details of Windows containers because I don't use any Windows software and therefore don't have a reason to run any Windows containers. If you are interested in how containers work at a lower level, you might get more out of the documentation for containerd and runc, which are the underlying container runtimes.

> No wonder people think it’s some sort of a VM.

From what I read, if one packages a Linux container for Windows, Docker does then run it in HyperV?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52164563/what-is-the-doc...

It is product of docker, if you would deploy applications by using namespaces and cgroups directly it is very likely you would see things the same way the author does.

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