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Containers Are Not Lightweight VMs
The Linux Foundation | 15 May 2017
This series provides a preview of the new, self-paced Containers Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation, which is designed for those who are new to container technologies. The course covers container building blocks, container runtimes, container storage and networking, Dockerfiles, Docker APIs, and more. In the first excerpt, we defined what containers are, and in this installment, we’ll explain a bit further. You can also sign up to access all the free sample chapter videos now.
Note that containers are not lightweight VMs. Both of these tools provide isolation and run applications, but the underlying technologies are completely different. The process of managing them is also different.
VMs are created on top of a hypervisor, which is installed on the host operating system. Containers directly run on the host operating system, without any guest OS of its own. The host operating system provides isolation and does resource allocation to individual containers.
Once you become familiar with containers and would like to deploy them on production, you might ask “Where should I deploy my containers — on VMs, bare metal, in the cloud?” From the container’s perspective, it does not matter as it can run anywhere. But in reality, many variables affect the decision, such as cost, performance, security, current skill set, and so on.
Find out more in these sample course videos below, taught by Neependra Khare (@neependra), Founder and Principal Consultant at CloudYuga, former Red Hat engineer, Docker Captain, and author of the Docker Cookbook:
Want to learn more? Access all the free sample chapter videos now!