Containers are making a lot of buzz recently. One might think they are a brand new technology that was not available before. However, that is not the case. Before the rise of Docker and Kubernetes, the dominating players in the industry at the moment, there were already solutions such as LXC, which offered a lot of similar features.
We can trace the origins of separating one execution environment from another with the chroot mechanism available in UNIX systems since 1979. Similar concepts were also used in FreeBSD jails and Solaris Zones.
The main task of the container is to isolate one execution environment from another. This isolated environment can have its own configuration, different applications, and even different user accounts than the host environment.
Even though the containers are isolated from the host, they usually share the same operating system kernel. This is the main differentiator from virtualized environments. Virtual machines have dedicated...
