Containers v/s Virtualizations

Understanding the difference between containers and virtualizations

Virtualization

In a traditional computer system, you have the hardware to that you install the Operating System. This means the operating system is attached to the hardware. If the hardware fails the Operating System dies. This makes it very difficult to find those hardware components and ship them to your location to bring those servers back on time. Virtualization has solved this problem by simply creating another layer to separate the underlying physical hardware from the operating system. This means the operating system is no longer attached to the physical hardware. This virtualization allows you to run different operating system instances on the same hardware. This virtualization layer is called a hypervisor. There are two types of hypervisors- Type 1 and Type 2. Check our story “Virtualization Overview” for details on bare-metal and hosted hypervisors.

Containers

Why do you need a container? Let's understand this with an example- say the developer builds an application in a development environment using the runtime engine Python3.8, dependencies, and configurations. The application is working fine and the life is good. Now the application moves to the test environment, the runtime engine is a couple of versions behind say…