It’s lighter than a VM but a bit heavier than aiming to run an application natively (and all the dependency & configuration hell that entails).

Basically a convenient way to package and run applications with all their dependencies, without regard for what libraries & configurations exist in the host OS and other containers.

If your application only works with up to version 42 of the Whatchamacallit library, you ship it with that version of Whatchamacallit, the underlying OS doesn’t need to install it. Other containers running on the system that depend on that library don’t get broken since they’re packaged with version 69 which works fine for them.

Meme answer: