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When Everything Looks Like a Container: Rethink...

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When Everything Looks Like a Container: Rethinking 15 Years of Cloud-Native Defaults

Containers earned their place in the modern engineering toolbox. They solved real problems around consistency, portability, and deployment, and they enabled teams to move faster with more confidence. But over the last decade and a half, containers also became the go-to answer for almost every workflow, from developer onboarding to CI pipelines to edge and automotive workloads. Some of those decisions were absolutely the right ones. Others were driven more by habit, momentum, or the absence of better options at the time.

In this talk, we will take a clear-eyed look at where containers served us well and where we may have unintentionally created complexity by assuming containers were the default solution. We will explore how patterns like dev containers for local environments and full Kubernetes runtimes in edge or in-car systems emerged, what tradeoffs they introduced, and how newer tools or approaches can sometimes offer simpler or more ergonomic paths.

This is not an anti-container talk. It is an invitation to reexamine long-standing assumptions with the experience we have now. Attendees will walk away with a practical framework for deciding when containers are genuinely the best choice, when alternative patterns might reduce cognitive or operational overhead, and how to have healthy, blame-free conversations about technical change within their teams.

Avatar for Michael Stahnke

Michael Stahnke

March 07, 2026
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  1. @stahnma 73 Unix Cloud Native Process Isolation Containers & Orchestration

    Process Supervision (systemd) K8s Controllers & Health Checks IPC (pipes, sockets) Services Meshes and gRPC Logging (syslog) ELK / Fluent / Loki ps, top, strace Prometheus & Grafana & Jaeger & OpenTelemetry User permissions RBAC & OPA & admission controllers Filesystem permissions Vault & sealed secrets Cron Kubernetes CronJobs talk, wall, signals Webhooks & event buses /etc/hosts, DNS Service discovery & ingress controllers
  2. 98 The cost of developing software rounds to zero when

    compared to operating it in perpetuity
  3. 132 Mutable tags are one area I won’t be gentle

    on. I think it might be the single biggest mistake in the container ecosystem.
  4. 141 A system at rest will remain online. — Newton

    (One of Newton’s lesser known laws)
  5. @stahnma 172 And now need a platform team to manage

    the portability layer we've never used to be portable.
  6. 184 Technology is the only industry where “legacy” is a

    bad word. But, “legacy” means it makes money.
  7. @stahnma 1. What problem am I actually solving? 2. Does

    the container solve it, or just defer it? 227
  8. @stahnma 1. What problem am I actually solving? 2. Does

    the container solve it, or just defer it? 3. What's the complexity tax, and who pays it? 228
  9. @stahnma 1. What problem am I actually solving? 2. Does

    the container solve it, or just defer it? 3. What's the complexity tax, and who pays it? 4. Could a simpler tool solve it with fewer layers? 229
  10. @stahnma 1. What problem am I actually solving? 2. Does

    the container solve it, or just defer it? 3. What's the complexity tax, and who pays it? 4. Could a simpler tool solve it with fewer layers? 5. Am I choosing this because it's right, or because it's default? 230
  11. 243 You are up against the most powerful force in

    the universe. Organizational Inertia.
  12. @stahnma "This is just how we do it" is not

    an engineering argument. 244