Containers and Virtual Machines at Scale
Prateek Sharma, Lucas Chaufournier, Prashant J. Shenoy, Yong Chiang Tay · 2016
Virtualization is used in data center and cloud environments to decouple applications from the hardware they run on. Hardware virtualization and operating system level virtualization are two prominent technologies that enable this. Containers, which use OS virtualization, have recently surged in interest and deployment. In this paper, we study the differences between the two virtualization technologies. We compare containers and virtual machines in large data center environments along the dimensions of performance, manageability and software development.