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Containerization

Containerization is a lightweight alternative to traditional virtualization that packages only the components needed to run a specific service, enabling fast deployment and easy scaling. Unlike hypervisors, containers share the host operating system's kernel rather than running fully independent environments.

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About this video

Containerization is an application deployment model that became an industry standard following Docker's popularization of the technology around 2013 and 2014. While it shares conceptual ground with hypervisor-based virtualization, it operates on a fundamentally different principle. Instead of running fully independent virtual machines, each with its own complete operating system, containers sit on top of a container engine that itself runs on a single host OS. Each container carries only the specific OS-level components it needs to function, rather than a full environment, which eliminates the resource duplication inherent in running multiple complete virtual machines. The result is a much smaller footprint per workload and significantly faster provisioning times. Containerization also supports highly elastic scaling, allowing organizations to spin up or tear down instances of a service rapidly in response to demand. These operational advantages have driven broad enterprise adoption across modern infrastructure. However, containers do come with meaningful trade-offs. Because all containers on a host share the same underlying kernel, the isolation between workloads is less strict than what a hypervisor provides. There are also kernel dependency considerations, meaning the software running inside a container must be compatible with the host operating system's kernel, and all containers on a given host are constrained to a single OS type.

What you'll learn

Distinguish between containerization and Type 1 hypervisor virtualization in terms of architecture, resource usage, and isolation
Identify the key advantages and limitations of container-based deployments, including scalability, kernel dependencies, and OS compatibility

What's covered

Containerization

vs. Hypervisor
- Type 1 Hypervisor
  - Full OS per VM
  - High resource usage
- More isolation
- Duplicate OS files
How Containers Work
- Base OS (e.g., Linux)
- Container Engine (Docker)
- Minimal OS components
- Shares underlying OS
Advantages
- Super fast deployment
- Highly scalable
- Smaller packages
Limitations
- Less isolation
- Kernel dependencies
- Single OS type only

Key terms

Hypervisor: Software that creates and manages virtual machines by abstracting hardware resources.
Virtual Machine: A software emulation of a physical computer that runs an operating system and applications.
Scalability: The ability of a system to handle increased load by adding resources without degrading performance.
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 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.

Topics

Containerization Virtualization Hypervisor Operating Systems Docker Cloud Infrastructure Kernel Architecture

Transcript

Containerization is another thing that's been around for a really long time, but it became popular in the mid 2010s, like 2013, 2014, as Docker came out and really popularized it. It's kind of like virtualization, like a hypervisor, but it works a little different than a typical hypervisor.

Comparing containers against a hypervisor

I think the easiest way to see what a container is is to compare it against a hypervisor, and specifically let's talk about a type 1 hypervisor. So here we have a hypervisor right here, and on that hypervisor we have very many virtual machines that are running. Now, the thing is, some of these virtual machines, like Windows, take up a lot of space, so they take up a lot of resources. Linux not as much, but we've got the whole environment that's running on top of that hypervisor. So that is like one self-contained unit, and there are some advantages and disadvantages to that.

Containerization does things a little differently. So we have an operating system — let's say it's Linux down here. Then we have the container engine; Docker would be an example of that. And then on top of that we have the containers.

One of the first things is that these containers are very simplistic and very easy to roll out. It's not like you're installing a whole operating system like you would be with a hypervisor. They're very small little packages. One of the reasons for that is there are elements of the operating system that can go into the container, but for the most part all of the operating system components are down here at this level right here. So we have the standard operating system, like Linux, and then up here in the container level there might be a piece of this container that has some of the operating system components in it, but it's just enough to run this container. It's no more than that.

So now we don't have as much duplicate. Over here we're duplicating the same files over and over and over again, because they're whole new environments from this hypervisor's perspective. But from a container perspective, we're only taking in the components that we need that run that service. So it's much smaller and much easier to deploy, and it makes things really fast to deploy these containers.

Advantages and trade-offs

Some of the advantages are that we get super fast deployment, and it's highly scalable — it makes it so that we can scale really fast and really easy. The problem is that there is a little less isolation to it. Even though they have components of the operating system on here, it is sharing this underlying operating system here, so there is less isolation than a hypervisor would have.

There are some kernel dependencies. So whatever we're running up here, we need to make sure that the kernel down here, the operating system, can run that. And you really only have one OS type, because of what I just mentioned there. You have an OS type right here, and those containers then have to be supported on whatever OS type there is.

But a lot of businesses have switched to this, because there are some really great advantages to containerization.

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