A package that contains an application and everything it needs to run, making it easy to move between different computers. Like a shipping container that can go on any truck or ship.
A developer packages their web app in a container so it works the same way on their laptop and in the cloud.
A container is the packaging format (e.g., a Docker/OCI image). These cloud services run and manage containers: Kubernetes services (EKS/AKS/GKE/OKE) orchestrate container clusters, while serverless container platforms (Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps) run containers without managing servers. ECS is AWS’s non-Kubernetes container orchestrator.