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Short abstract:

Just as shipping containers made possible a revolutionary expansion in the circulation of global capital, so too does the software container's offerings of standardization and modularity enable the massive and opaque level of scale that characterizes the cloud today.

Long abstract:

This paper charts the rise of the software container, or the packaging of software into deterministic and portable environments. Through containers and container management technology like Docker and Kubernetes, software at a high level can be segregated, hidden, moved, and interfaced with in a standard and replicable manner. I contend that just as shipping containers made possible a tenfold decrease in transport cost and a thirtyfold increase in global shipping and the circulation of capital, so too does the software container's offerings of standardization and modularity enable the massive and opaque level of scale that characterizes the cloud today. To articulate this claim, I trace the history of container technology development alongside the history of the cloud, beginning with the container's prehistory in the Unix operating system through its exploding popularity in the 2010s. Through an examination of development work in open-source communities like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Linux kernel that facilitate container development, I also argue that the intrinsically exclusive drive to scale is closely linked to discourses of openness and the commons, a culmination of Silicon Valley's understanding of freedom as an entrepreneurial endeavor. I conclude with a call for critical scholars of technology to not only consider the infrastructural components of platform capitalism but also its logistical aspects -- the technologies and techniques coordinating the circulation of capital.