On the rPath to virtual containerization

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most important use of virtualization is not to consolidate hardware boxes but to protect applications from the vagaries of the operating environments they run on. It’s all about “containerization,” to employ a really ugly but useful word.
Until fairly recently this was anything but the consensus view. On the contrary, the idea that virtualization is mostly about consolidation has been conventional wisdom ever since IDC started touting VMware’s roaring success as one of the reasons behind last year’s slowdown in server hardware sales.