A quick confession The first production system I was ever a part of, long before anyone said "Kubernetes," ran on a lovingly hand-tuned SunOS box at the NIH with 2 (TWO!) CPUs. We cursed at shared library issues, noisy neighbors, and slow disks, and swore that if we could only break free and add one more machine, life would be glorious. Then came the advent of VMs. I was lucky enough to be part of shipping many more production systems—at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon—this time on virtual machines instead of physical hardware. Many problems were solved. And many more sprung up. Fast-forward a few more years and, sure enough, we have a new layer of abstraction: containers. But here's the twist: the VM never actually left. It just sank a layer lower in the stack and quietly kept the lights on. Why VMs Started to Feel Like the Bad Guy Containers gave us millisecond start times, tiny footprints, and the fantasy that hardware had vanished. By comparison, VMs looked heavy, slow, and dangerously stateful.…