Comparing Traditional Deployment vs Virtual Machine vs Containers

The article below compares the three key approaches to installing and running applications.

Image: Traditional vs Virtualization vs Containers

Traditional Deployment: Organizations installed and ran applications on a physical server. This approach while simple had many limitations

Cons:

• No isolation of resources
• Overutilization by one app could crash the entire system
• Scaling issues
• Long Downtimes
• Expensive to maintain physical servers

Virtual Machine?provides an abstraction of the physical hardware. A Hypervisor allows multiple Virtual Machines (VM) to run on a single server. Each VM has a full copy of OS, app binaries, and libraries

Pros:

• Better utilization of resources than traditional methods
• Applications are isolated

Cons:

• OS images are heavy (GB) and have a slow bootup process
• Applications are not portable
• Not Scalable
• Can get expensive

Containers?provide abstraction at the application layer. Code and all dependencies are packaged together so that an application can run across platforms such as desktop, data center, and cloud. Each container runs as an isolated process while sharing the same OS kernel.

Pros

• Lightweight (Mbs) and quick bootup
• Containers are highly portable
• Inexpensive?
• Highly scalable

Cons:

• Applications are not fully isolated. Security is a concern.
• Management is critical as containers can be spun out at a rapid pace
• Skill shortage

Image: Containers and Virtual Machine Statistics.?Source [1], [2], [3], [4]