Containers and software packages share many traits, but there are also many key attributes lacking in the container management ecosystem that are otherwise present in the package management ecosystem. The popular thinking is that containers do not need package management as those tasks either don’t apply or can be delegated to a higher level orchestrator. The consequence of missing patterns from the packaging community is a less robust and less consistent user experience in distributed cloud compared to what we experience in other domains. This talk will discuss similarities (eg: state management, configuration, and organization of packages into meta-packages) and differences (eg: weak versioning, metadata inclusion, and build determinism) in the container ecosystem compared with familiar package management ecosystems and propose potential improvements to container management inspired by learnings from the package management space.