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Containerisation Vs Virtualisation - What's The Difference - PDF

Containerisation allows applications to run in isolated userspace environments without the overhead of virtual machines (VMs) and guest operating systems. Containers offer improved performance and flexibility compared to VMs by eliminating layers, resulting in faster startup times and workload portability. While both enable hardware-agnostic workloads, containerisation provides OS-level virtualization compared to the full hardware virtualization of VMs.

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110 views

Containerisation Vs Virtualisation - What's The Difference - PDF

Containerisation allows applications to run in isolated userspace environments without the overhead of virtual machines (VMs) and guest operating systems. Containers offer improved performance and flexibility compared to VMs by eliminating layers, resulting in faster startup times and workload portability. While both enable hardware-agnostic workloads, containerisation provides OS-level virtualization compared to the full hardware virtualization of VMs.

Uploaded by

mukisa cliff
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Containerisation vs Virtualisation – 26
what’s the difference? Nov 15

Posted November 26, 2015 by Jason Showell

Containers and virtual machines are two of the most popular methods for application
deployment. Understanding the similarities and differences can help you to choose the
right method for your project.

Containerisation is Operating System (OS) virtualisation, whereas deploying Virtual


Machines (VMs) is hardware virtualisation. Popularised by the open-source project
Docker, containerisation is taking the IT industry by storm and presents another option for
your business’ cloud hosting.

But what exactly is it and how does it differ from virtualisation?

What is containerisation?
A container is a uniform structure in which any application can be stored, transported and
run. It is named for and often compared to the standardised intermodal containers used in
the shipping industry for efficient transportation.

In the software world, containerisation is an efficient method for deploying applications. A


container encapsulates an application with its own operating environment. It can be
placed on any host machine without special configuration, removing the issue of
dependencies.

The techniques of containerisation are not new, but have shot to prominence as
businesses such as Netflix and Google have used them to overcome the constraints of
machine virtualisation.

What’s the difference between containerisation and


virtualisation?
Both of these approaches allow you to make workloads hardware agnostic. In fact, at its
simplest, containerisation is just another approach to server virtualisation. However, there
are substantial differences between the two methods.

Deploying VMs, the approach we’ve all become accustomed to over the last five years, is
hardware virtualisation, whereas containerisation is OS virtualisation. An application on a
VM requires a guest OS and thus an underlying hypervisor to run.

By contrast, an application in a container, doesn’t require a guest OS or hypervisor. It


allows an application to run in the Userspace of the OS – a segment of the computer
memory that is kept separate from the critical processes of the OS kernel.

This leads to improved performance, as an application’s instructions do not have to pass


through the guest OS and the hypervisor to reach the CPU. It also means that applications
in containers are smaller and can be started up in seconds, compared to minutes for VMs.
Significantly, container applications offer much more stability - they never hang on the
host OS, like VM applications can do, which takes all VMs on the host offline.

Essentially, containerisation is a lightweight approach to virtualisation.

Although there are obvious benefits of containerisation over virtualisation, it does have its
disadvantages too, and there are certainly scenarios where virtualisation is a better
option. Whilst hypervisors are by no means set to become redundant, containerisation will
have a growing position in the future of server hosting.

To find out more about containerisation, including how it can be used for application
hosting and what’s involved in adopting it, download our introduction eBook.

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