Working in a place where we have hundreds of small apps, the issue of maintaining umpteen servers is a great pain. Docker reduces the footprint of what has to be maintained substantially.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but there is technically nothing blocking AWS to have the same management in EC2. Scaling docker containers is the same allocation problem than scaling VMs, so it could be done with EC2 too.
Maybe AWS spins up an actual EC2 instance for each container, it's an implementation detail.
EC2 is a legacy tool with different abstractions, but if you replace "VM" by "hypervisor" and "container" by "microkernel-app", you could do the same thing with one less layer and the same tech we always used
FWIW, there is tooling in place such that you can just recycle the hosts in your fleet and they'll be brought up with the latest image. so you can become just another scheduled and automated event.
But what about maintenance?
Working in a place where we have hundreds of small apps, the issue of maintaining umpteen servers is a great pain. Docker reduces the footprint of what has to be maintained substantially.