Differences Between Virtual Machines (VM) and Containers
Abhay Reddy
Demand and Growth Marketing Executive | Ranked Top 100 Global Influencers in Marketing and Sales by Thinkers360 | Startup Mentor | Proven expertise in aggressive sales growth
As the application container and virtual machine market continue to grow, there has been a tremendous interest in how they differ, and which of them is the better approach for specific projects. The keyword ‘virtual machines vs containers’ was searched?2400?times (on average) per month in the US alone [source: Google]
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
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.
The table below explores the key differences between the two approaches.