Containers: Whats the Hype Anyways?

Flashback To The Past: Bare Metals To Virtual machines

Historically, each one of your production applications were hosted on individual Bare Metal Machines. With the advent of Virtual Machines it became possible to run many operating systems on a single bare metal machine. With the number of physical machines reduced , Virtual Machines help reduce the technology footprint of your organization.

What is a Hypervisor

A Hypervisor is a layer of software which enable multiple operating systems to run on the same bare metal machine. Hypervisors are key to hosting multiple applications, each with their own OS on your bare metals machine

VMs Vs Containers

As discussed Virtual Machine's need a Hypervisor in order to run on a Host Operating System. On the other hand containers do not need Hypervisor and also do not contain an operating system.

Containers Can Run Anywhere

Because of the lightweight nature of containers, your applications are future proof as they can be moved across public, private, hybrid and multicloud environments.

Containers can also run on any host operating system without the application code having to be changed

Container Footprint is much Smaller than a VM Footprint

As we know Virtual Machine's need a Hypervisor in order to run and each Virtual Machine contains a Guest Operating System. This additional overhead means Virtual Machine's require more memory consumption and CPU usage.

Larger Ecosystem

Most container runtime systems offer a repository of pre-built images that you can create your container from. For example, if you wanted to deploy an NGinx reverse proxy you can use the NGinx official docker image This drastically reduces overhead as the nginx comes with the appropriate packages and configurations pre-build and you will not have to set up your environment to run NGinx.

According to a recent Gartner report:

“By 2023, more than 70% of global organizations will be running more than two containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% in 2019.”

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