It's called out in the post: most applications are not written to deal with reads / writes suddenly dropping in throughput. How are you supposed to rate limit the IOPS of a program you don't control? Can you make `docker' do exponential backoff if it notices some operations are taking too long?

In a network scenario, the remote service could say something like Quota exceeded, please try again later. read and write syscalls don't really work like that. They instead remain in uninterruptible sleep, which means they can't wake up, or be killed or stop.