Containers work if you want to have a unit of deployment with up to 2,000 servers. Google used containers early on, but doesn't use them anymore. Some of the biggest use of Containers is by Microsoft's data center group. DCD covers Microsoft discussing how containers contain outages.

“In the electrical and mechanical design of this data center, we considered each container as a discrete failure domain and modeled the availability of power and cooling with the expectation that maintenance events and unplanned outages would occur in the environment,” Gauthier writes. Failures would also be compartmentalized in a standard and predictable way.

I was looking at this presentation of Google's cluster system. Note how the network and power topology is deployed to support a cluster.

Mike Manos and I talked long time ago about how containers encapsulate compute, network, storage, power and cooling, but you can also encapsulate these principles if your data center uses the same principles to support a cluster of functionality.

Google achieves the same containment of power, cooling, compute, storage, and network as Microsoft does in a container, but without the physical container.

What is nice to see is that the SW team knows they have a big role in saving energy.