Honey I Shrunk The Container
(or how I found out about microcontainers and why I think you should use them) Context About 18 months ago I was asked to help an ISV partner who wanted to migrate their product to cloud. At the time they had a very traditional software industry business model - sell the customer a license to run their software, along with a subscription for ongoing support. However they wanted to be able to move to a SaaS model where the customer would consume their software as a service running in the cloud. Their stack consisted of: a Ruby on Rails application Postgres Redis Their initial attempt at creating a SaaS offering had been to run this as a set of VMs on top of IaaS. While the software ran just fine, they soon saw that this approach wasn't going to give them a successful SaaS business. If any part of the application were experiencing high demand, the only way to scale it was to start another instance of the whole application . Since they were packaging the applic