After a decade in the container ecosystem, I look at what did containers do for us in devops? What went well, what did they help, and what did they hinder? If we hadn’t had containers would we have been forced to invent them, or could we have got by, or been better off without them? I will use my inside view from the last ten years to explore what could have been and how we got here, and what this means for the future in devops.