Alex Williams discusses cloud, containers and microservices with Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO, Cloud Foundation Services at IBM. The discussion begins, as good discussions tend to, with a brief history.

“As you’re probably aware,” Jason says, “IBM has a pretty long history in what you would think of as ‘virtualization’ and workload management technology — ‘How do we run multiple applications in shared infrastructure?’ — going all the way back to some of the seminal work around the mainframe, and even work that we’ve done on Linux.”

“For a long time,” he says, “we’ve been thinking about how to package workloads, how to run workloads side-by-side on a computer system, and control isolation and sharing of resources.”

From IBM’s perspective, according to Jason, these problems led to the beginning of containers. The early work IBM did 11 or 12 years ago involved looking at how to build into the Linux kernel some of their ideas from mainframe systems — AIX and other UNIX systems — and put in the primitives that allowed resource isolation between different applications.