I know Google runs at a huge scale, but isn't even for them 2 billion containers / week a LOT? I assume a lot of these only run for a really short time? Are containers the new scripts?
This also doesn't speak to the number of long running containers. There are plenty that don't stop/start during the week I grabbed that number.
[1] http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y2...
They certainly seem to work well for that. Heroku, for example, uses containers for not just persistent processes (application servers, workers) but also short-lived processes. Tasks that run on a schedule (hourly, daily, etc.) are run by, you guessed it, starting up a container running a processes which exits when it's finished. One-off commands like maintenance scripts or REPLs work the same way.