6. Containers are a programmer's approach to a mechanical engineer's problem

Some say that there are good reasons why geeks have given Microsoft a free pass so far on its containers plan. First, they seem to offer a long-overdue paradigm shift in power and cooling problems that, by comparison, seem to routinely occur in software and other areas of IT, but that haven't yet really happened for power and cooling.

"I think IT guys look at how much faster we can move data and think this can also happen in the real world of electromechanics," Baker said.

Another is that techies, unfamiliar with and perhaps even a little afraid of electricity and cooling issues, want something that will make those factors easier to control, or if possible a nonproblem. Containers seem to offer that.

"These guys understand computing, of course, as well as communications," Svenkeson said. "But they just don't seem to be able to maintain a staff that is competent in electrical and mechanical infrastructure. They don't know how that stuff works."

Svenkeson tells the story of the data center manager whose UPS systems kept overloading, even though he had each of them set at only 80 per cent load. Turns out, the pair of UPSs was running 160 per cent of the maximum load through his servers, which is why they kept failing.

Attempting to eliminate these variables through plug-and-play containers "is a fairly natural response," Svenkeson said, though he believes it's the wrong one. He argues that containers will ultimately be seen as a "fast-food approach."

"It might be a viable market, but only for a limited time," he said. "As soon as the first containers arrive with a bunch of broken processors inside, that will be the end of it."

Manos is unfazed. Much of the criticism, he implied, is knee-jerk.

"Data centers are very conservative," he said. "You go into one built a year ago or one built 10 years ago and they'll look very similar."

Microsoft had been testing containers for almost a year before it started talking about them publicly, Manos said. What Microsoft has revealed so far is just the tip of the iceberg. When critics learn more, he says, they'll be convinced.

"Half of the people say this is the greatest thing they'd ever heard. The other half say this will never work inside a data center," Manos said. "But the fact of the matter is that this does work."