Long term platform stability seems to be moving from relying on the OS to higher up in the stack with the advent of Docker. It feels like Docker is being used more and more in cases where I would have considered something like CentOS.
The complexity is still under the bed. We're all going to have to dig under that bed one day. Or we're just going to end up buying new hockey sticks, football pads, etc. Which is to say, we're going to end up with Linux on top of Docker on top of Linux.
Also, easy to backup.
That's just my opinion of course. It's possible to write confusing Dockerfiles but really they're mostly just shell scripts. And the idea of "Linux on top of Docker" seems a bit odd - there's only ever one Linux kernel no matter how many containers you have running. Docker is built on Linux.
Container solutions really only get you out of “doing the work” if you can leverage a prepackaged container management solution from a cloud provider. Self-hosted containers are frequently more trouble than they’re worth since the solutions for managing them are either insanely complex (Kubernetes) or so simplistic you have to write some custom logic to build/deploy them.
Agree with the point about CentOS though; at this point the idea of a Linux “distro” is dead. The way forward is a hypervisor model where the kernel is protected from application code (including all dependencies from the userland) with barebones Docker images like Alpine used as the basis for a declaratively-defined system. The one thing Docker does very well is isolate dependencies which reduces integration complexity and lets you modularuse the whole thing. Incidentally this actually makes it harder for hobbyists to get into as the mental model for it has a lot more complexity and you need more expert knowledge to write the scripts to build and configure your app automatically.
Kind of worrisome to abandon lower layers with their problems and build on top of them, but what can you do, but get good at jenga.