[disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of the paper] I 100% agree, containers are an amazing dev env/reprodicble env tool! In fact, we think they're the perfect marriage to the unikernels (specialized VMs) we used in the paper; on kraft.cloud , a cloud platform we built, we use Dockerfiles to specify apps/filesystems, and transparently convert them to unikernels for deployment. The end result is the convenience of containers with the power of unikernels (eg, millisecond cold starts, scale to zero and autoscale, reduced TCB, etc).