My impression is that once we didn’t want to call jails for containers to differentiate them to jails’ advantage: they’re essentially more secure. They’re not just containers (if your frame of reference is Linux).

But since containers have become such a hype in our global infrastructure, and people are seeking off the big cloud platforms, perhaps it is more in FreeBSD’s interest to remind off-clouders that FreeBSD does have container technology.

Man Allan Jude is a name I haven't heard in awhile. I was a big fan of Jupiter Broadcasting back around ~2013-2015, and I used to listen to "BSD Now", even though I didn't run BSD. Kind of sad how nuts Bryan Lunduke and to a lesser extent Chris Fisher have gone, since I used to love listening to all their shows while driving to and from work.

Anyway, when I ran FreeNAS in 2015, I certainly thought of Jails as containers, and I thought of them as roughly analogous to Docker. I always thought of both of them as "light VMs", `chroot` on steroids is not a terrible way to put it, as the article pointed out. They both share their host kernels and have lower overhead than something like QEMU or bhyve or Xen. I guess Docker feels a bit more declarative, but that seems more like a layer on top of the underlying tech of cgroups and whatnot than anything else.

This feels like arguing about semantics for arguments' sake.

I had people fight me on this twice on HN and reddit. Although I often contended that containers are virtualization, which is what brought pushback.

I'm a bit lazy to dig it up. But if a stalker wants to feel free to dig it up.

I have used Jails in the past, and whatever they are I still think Jails are more secure then Linux's container of the day.