Understanding containers
When VM technology was introduced, you were able to run multiple VMs on the same physical hardware with resource isolation. This allowed for hardware virtualization – any communication with the host was through a hypervisor. VMs could offer immutability with VM images, so when you needed a new VM, you could use an existing VM image, and the environment would be consistent without all the previously required manual or scripted steps – great! With all the benefits that VMs bring, for certain workloads, they became somewhat heavy. Each VM has a full operating system kernel, all the relevant binaries, libraries, and applications, and anything else needed specifically for the application to run.
A Quick Stop for Some Terminology
Modern operating systems separate virtual memory into kernel space (which is used by the operating system kernel, drivers, and a few other things) and user space (which is where applications run). So, when I want to think...
