Your understanding of not-containers is incorrect.

In non-containerized applications, the data & state live outside the application, store in files, database, cache, s3, etc.

In fact, this is the only way containers can decouple programs from state — if it’s already done so by the application. But with containers you have the extra steps of setting up volumes, virtual networks, and port translation.

But I’m not surprised this has to be explained to some people in 2025, considering you probably think that a CPU is something transmitted by a series of tubes from AWS to Vercel that is made obsolete by NVidia NFTs.