so you're right its not exactly the same (and it might not even be a very similar implementation ala how docker is), but the bullet points are the same.

ephemeral, instant boot strap, append only (I'm pretty sure I was the first person to use ephemeral computing this way, at the time I couldn't find anything that touched it. People used containers, ala ZFS/Zones, but they were generally meant for long term computing and not for bringing up an environment for a very small period of time and then tearing it down.)

This paper with bellovin applied it to system administration - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/full_papers/...

though we also approached recording and forking your computation at will - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1323293.1294289 (I'm proud of coining the name), though it strongly relates to Microsoft's recall so it would probably be viewed less positively today (in fact, this might be closer in implementation to what they are doing than the above).

with that said, it was a bit more tongue in cheek than anything.

as an aside, I sort of wonder in the age of AI and the ability to reproduce anything easily, we might have to expand patents (related to comment below that got downvoted), but dont have strong thoughts on this yet.