A strange thing is going on in IT these days, an unintentional fake out that on the surface could lead people to wonder if operating systems are becoming more and more irrelevant–when actually the opposite is going on.

In 2011, I addressed this topic from the perspective of the desktop, arguing that while the software as a service (SaaS) way of doing things would seem to suggest that applications that run in the browser don’t really need to care about the desktop operating system, the then-rising app-store model of application deployment made the choice of operating system all the more important. Native apps installed on operating systems kept the notion of operating systems alive (even if those apps were merely tricked-up portals to the same web services to which a browser could link).

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With DockerCon wrapping up earlier this week, it’s little surprise that containers are getting a lot of attention in the Web-o-sphere these days.

One of the better articles I have seen in a while that covers container technology is Rami Rosen’s piece on Linux Journal. This is a great primer that gets into the guts of containers, explaining not only how they work but why they are beneficial:

As Project Atomic continues to lift off, a lot of attention has been focused on the container aspects of Atomic, and our consumption of the popular Docker container technology. Atomic, however, is not just about container technology, nor is it solely about the GearD container management that will also be a part of Project Atomic host. Nor just about about Cockpit. It’s about all of those technologies and more.

But what makes Atomic atomic? I’ve had some people come up to me and ask if we are making a word-play on the container/size thing and using the label Atomic to describe container technology. In actuality, the atomic in Atomic describes the one bit of technology that makes Project Atomic very unique: rpm-ostree.

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One of the most interesting things about Project Atomic is how much work is going on, even as the project seems to be standing still. After the discussions Joe and I have had at OSCON this past week, I can safely say the work around containers is moving so fast that it almost seems that if you blink you will miss it.

Atomic is not the usual open source project, in that there’s not really code to...