Motivations and goals

What are the motivations behind containers, container orchestration, and cloud environments? Why do we see such momentum in this area?

Traditionally, enterprise application deployment worked something like the following. Application developers implemented some business logic and built the application into a packaged artifact. This artifact was deployed manually on an application server that was managed manually as well. During deployment or reconfiguration of the server, the application usually faced a downtime.

Naturally, this approach is a rather high-risk process. Human, manual tasks are error-prone and are not guaranteed to be executed in the same manner each and every time. Humans are rather bad at executing automated, repetitive work. Processes such as installing application servers, operating systems and servers in general, require precise documentation, especially for future reproducibility.

In the past, tasks for operation teams typically were ordered using a...