Containers vs Virtual Machines Overview
Network Computing has witnessed groundbreaking innovations in every decade. Similar to Artificial Intelligence in the previous decade, cloud computing was a paradigm shift that occurred in the early 1970s. Since 2013, the debate on Containers and Virtual Machines has been a hot topic.
The container revolution took the app development industry by storm after virtualization hype became too much. It solves the problems associated with virtualization. Container App Development is almost identical to VMs in many aspects. We will explore this in detail in this article.
Containerization has two goals: improvement in data center technology and application development. Container App development is a way to achieve this goal with less hardware usage. This is why Container App development will always win the battle against Virtual Machines.
History of Containerization
Containerization technology is not new. LXC and Solaris Zones, through their Linux container solutions, laid the foundation for modern containerization. Their container technologies are used by giant corporations like Google, according to reports.
Containerization technology was not widely available until 2013. 2013 was the year that containerization gained widespread acceptance. Docker containers made it easy to switch between Linux versions. It also allowed containers to create microservices. Let’s take a look at the timeline.
1982, Chroot for Most UNIX Like OS
2001, Linux VServer for Linux Windows Server 16
2004 Solaris Containers for Illusions, Solaris
2008, LXC for Linux
2013, Docker for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows x64, macOS
2015, Singularity for Linux
This list highlights the most significant changes in virtualization over the past few years. These breakthroughs were not the only ones.
What are Virtual Machines?
Virtual Machines can be thought of as a virtual computer. VMs are built on a similar architecture and provide the functionality of physical hardware and computing systems. It is a software program that runs on top of emulating programs. This hypervisor is the emulating program.
Hypervisor is a software environment that replicates the functionality of physical hardware resources. The host machines are the resources, and the Virtual Machines that run under hypervisors are the guest machines.
Virtual Machines need to have certain attributes. These attributes are essential for VMs to perform their task. Below are the basic characteristics of VMs.
Computing
Storage
Memory
Networking
Hardware functionality is available as a virtualized systems
Virtual machines also include system binaries, libraries, and other software. These libraries are necessary to run the apps on VMs.
How Virtual Machines Work
We’ve already discussed the fact that virtual machines emulate computing systems. They work in a similar way. The hardware resources in VM are combined to run the apps on the VM.
Virtual Machines are unique because their physical hardware can be modified without affecting the app’s performance. An abstraction layer allows you to decouple the apps from the background infrastructure.
Virtual machines have their drawbacks
The background hardware can run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. However, VMs require a lot of resource. It doesn’t allow individual applications to run on isolated PC-like virtual machines. If an app workload requires a migration between different virtual machines or physical data ce,
