Container or Virtual Machine?

About this interactive

Containers and virtual machines both keep services apart on shared hardware, but they split the work differently. A virtual machine runs on a Type 1 hypervisor and carries a whole operating system of its own. That makes it large and slower to deploy, and the same OS files are repeated in every VM. In return it is strongly isolated, and VMs on one host can run different operating systems, a Windows guest beside a Linux one. A container runs on a container engine, such as Docker, on top of one host operating system. It carries only the few OS parts its service needs and shares the host's kernel for the rest. So it is small, starts in seconds and scales out fast. The price is less isolation, because containers share the OS beneath them, and a kernel dependency: a container has to suit the host's OS type. To sort a card, ask whether the thing described brings its own operating system or borrows the host's.

What you'll learn

Tell a container, which shares the host operating system's kernel through a container engine, from a virtual machine, which runs a whole guest operating system on a hypervisor
Match each to its trade-offs: containers' speed, small size and scalability against less isolation and one OS type, and virtual machines' stronger isolation and OS choice against their size

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.1 Compare and contrast security implications of different architecture models.

Key terms

Containerization: A deployment model that isolates applications and their dependencies inside lightweight containers that share the host operating system kernel, enabling consistent execution across different environments without duplicating a full OS.
Container: A lightweight, portable unit of software that packages an application and its dependencies to run consistently across environments.
Virtual Machine: A software emulation of a physical computer that runs an operating system and applications.
Container Engine: Software such as Docker that manages the creation, deployment, and execution of containers on a host operating system.
Kernel: The core component of an operating system that manages hardware resources, process scheduling, and memory, operating at the highest privilege level and separating user-facing processes from direct hardware access.
Hypervisor: Software that creates and manages virtual machines by abstracting hardware resources.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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