What we're seeing emerge here is a new universal binary format.

I've thought of Docker containers for a long time as gigantic statically linked binaries. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (though it does present issues). In some ways the process of installing the different moving pieces of a service and configuring them is a bit like manually "linking" something -- sub-services like MySQL, Redis, etc. are analogous to libraries.

Now what we're seeing is a runtime for this binary being ported around to different platforms. This could get interesting.