How was industry dealing with containerizations and container orchestration before Docker and Kubernetes? [closed]

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Before Kafka, we had RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ etc. Mostly there use to be a something before version, in technology. But What was industry using something similar to Docker and Kubernetes, before they both became prevalent?

Answer 1

The earliest analogous approach was probably BSD Jails, or on Linux and some other environments, a chroot environment (also sometimes called a chroot jail).

Chroot basically changes what directories are visible to an application, essentially virtualizing just the filesystem. When used to isolate applications for some sort of security purpose, it is generally important that the process running not be running as root, since root can undermine the chroot isolation easily. This is (arguably) somewhat less important in docker, although I think there have been security issues related to that in docker. In chroot, it's sometimes a feature, since you typically set up the chroot filesystem as root, and run the process as something else when ready.

BSD jails are closer to docker containers in that they have their own user accounts in addition to an isolated filesystem, as well as a virtualized networking environment. Unlike chroot, a jailed process has no ability to even see processes running outside the jail. The main thing that's missing is probably the ease of use of pulling an image from somewhere (vs just using tar), and probably the command line interface approach to exposing ports, mapping shared volumes, etc.