Even on a small scale there are significant benefits, both in production and in development and test. As the article states, containers are great for moving away from a monolith architecture. Many applications are moving to a distributed service oriented architecture. Each piece can be deployed separate. That leads to an easier more maintainable development process. However, the larger number of independently deployable apps adds operation complexity. Trying to manage that complexity, even on a small scale is no fun. Queue containers. Containers by themselves are interesting; they let you run many more applications on a single machine. Unlike a VM, there is no operating system chewing up ram and cpu. On machines only able to run 4 VM's reasonably well, I have seen nearly a hundred containers. That is only a small part. Container platforms such as Openshift make the process much nicer and more powerful. Openshift uses Kubernetes under the covers. You arrange your applications inside pods. The pods are wrapped in a Kubernetes service. The pods automatically assign internal ip addresses; that allows you to put, let's say, 20 wildfly servers on the same machine without worrying about ip and port clashes. The service acts as a load balancer and a router directs traffic accordingly. I don't have to worry about any of that. It is all automated. I create a build config and a deployment config for my services (there could be hundreds) then Openshift (or other container PAAS) maximizes the potential of my hardware. In development, it is much easier to completely replicate production. Everything is encapsulated in the container image. Not just the application; all of the software and configuration the application requires is part of the image. If I need to recreate the container image, every step is in the Dockerfile. I do not need documentation to remind me how everything is set up. In openshift, I grab a template, then click a button; within seconds, the containers of my app are running. That would take much longer with VMs. Containers allow me to develop in a production like environment because I am able to deploy an unscaled version easily. What took multiple physical machines to replicate now takes a few seconds to deploy on a laptop.