Yeah, I see what you mean (when taking the word 'container' in its technical meaning.) I'm not arguing with that; in fact, that was the same point I was making!

But I think that people don't tend to use the word "container" to describe "a container used as a VPS."

Which points at a deeper issue: we really don't have a term for "the software-artifact product of the Twelve-Factor App methdology." We refer to these things as containers, but they're really an overlapping idea. They're signed/content-hashed tarballs of immutable-infrastructure software that can be automatically deployed, shot in the head, horizontally shared-nothing scaled, etc. These properties all make something very amenable to container-based virtualization; but they aren't the same thing as container-based virtualization. But in practice, people conflate the two, such that we don't even have a word for the type of software itself other than "Docker/OCI image." (But a Google App Engine workload is such a thing too, despite not being an OCI image! Heck, Heroku popularized many of the factors of the Twelve-Factor methodology [and named the thing, too], but their deploy-slugs aren't OCI images either.)

My claim was intended to mean that, if your software meets none of the properties of a [twelve-factor app OCI image workload thing], then you're not "doing [twelve-factor app OCI image workload thing]", and so you shouldn't rely on the basically-synonymous infrastructure that supports [twelve-factor app OCI image workload thing], i.e. containers. :)

Ah ok, cool yeah I think we're in total agreement then. No doubt you are absolutely right, the word container is used commonly to mean all sorts of things that aren't technically related to the technology we call containers :-)

I do think a lot of enterprise marketing and startup product pitching has made this problem so much worse. I see this a lot with Red Hat customers (and Red Hat employees too for that matter). "Containers" are painted as this great solution and the new correct way of doing things, even though much of what is being sold isn't tied to the technical implementation of containers. There indeed isn't a good marketing-worthy buzzword to describe immutable infrastructure/12-factor app and all that at a high level.