What are containers?
Containers offer a logical packaging mechanism in which applications can be abstracted from the environment in which they actually run. This decoupling allows container-based applications to be deployed easily and consistently, regardless of whether the target environment is a private data center, the public cloud, or even a developer’s personal laptop. Containerization provides a clean separation of concerns, as developers focus on their application logic and dependencies, while IT operations teams can focus on deployment and management without bothering with application details such as specific software versions and configurations specific to the app.
For those coming from virtualized environments, containers are often compared with virtual machines (VMs). You might already be familiar with VMs: a guest operating system such as Linux or Windows runs on top of a host operating system with virtualized access to the underlying hardware. Like virtual machines, containers allow you to package your application together with libraries and other dependencies, providing isolated environments for running your software services. As you’ll see below however, the similarities end here as containers offer a far more lightweight unit for developers and IT Ops teams to work with, carrying a myriad of benefits.
What benefits do containers offer?
A container may be only tens of megabytes in size, whereas a virtual machine with its own entire operating system may be several gigabytes in size. Because of this, a single server can host far more containers than virtual machines.
Another major benefit is that virtual machines may take several minutes to boot up their operating systems and begin running the applications they host, while containerized applications can be started almost instantly. That means containers can be instantiated in a "just in time" fashion when they are needed and can disappear when they are no longer required, freeing up resources on their hosts.
A third benefit is that containerization allows for greater modularity. Rather than run an entire complex application inside a single container, the application can be split in to modules (such as the database, the application front end, and so on). This is the so-called microservices approach. Applications built in this way are easier to manage because each module is relatively simple, and changes can be made to modules without having to rebuild the entire application. Because containers are so lightweight, individual modules (or microservices) can be instantiated only when they are needed and are available almost immediately.
Containers vs. virtual machines (VMs)
People sometimes confuse container technology with virtual machines (VMs) or server virtualization technology. Although there are some basic similarities, containers are very different from VMs.
Virtual machines run in a hypervisor environment where each virtual machine must include its own guest operating system inside it, along with its related binaries, libraries, and application files. This consumes a large amount of system resources and overhead, especially when multiple VMs are running on the same physical server, each with its own guest OS.
In contrast, each container shares the same host OS or system kernel and is much lighter in size, often only megabytes. This often means a container might take just seconds to start (versus the gigabytes and minutes required for a typical VM).
