What is your typical server infrastructure? We use bare machines and had kernel panics very rarely (only with experimental MACVLAN). We did not 'get away' with anything. We have been using Docker for over 2 years, and LXC much more and know how to handle mounted directories, it is not a rocket science. We used LXC, now Docker to provide quick isolated mini linux environments. They are just different type of Virtual Machines when you abstract it in your head, and do not expect it to do magical stuff like saving your data and send it to another host upon crash.
> Native storage software packages are available for mainstream OSes that handle dependencies via the native package manager.
They are often outdated, we mostly get one of the latest builts, and in some cases Snapshot builds, where they are not available anywhere. So ability to run versioned instances of some software independently and isolated is a huge win for us. We do not want to distrub people using the old version. Yes it can be solved with VMs. We use our own bare metal servers. We do not like to "pay" to open VMs, so we turned to OpenStack. It is very complicated for our use case, we like to use bare metal on our own. But, we still need isolation, this is where containers; LXC and Docker came to help and saved us a burden.
