Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1293607
CHAPTER 1 What Are Containers? 5 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Virtual Machines vs. Containers vs. Bare Metal As you learn about containers, you'll undoubtedly run across lots of blog posts and other authoritative articles that help you try to understand whether you should try to choose between containers or traditional virtualization for your data center. The fact is that this question requires far more context. In fact, it's almost like saying, "Should we take the car or should we go on vacation?" The comparison isn't really valid. The real question you should ask is: Should I deploy workloads using a traditional method or a containerized one? The focus here should be on the workload, not on the underlying infrastructure. And if you choose containers for your deployment efforts, your next ques- tion should be: Should I deploy this on bare metal, into a virtualized environment, or in the cloud? Adopting containers doesn't mean eliminating virtualization. You might even choose to go to a full- on Inception-like infrastructure and run containers inside other containers! A quick virtualization architecture review Before continuing, I want to give you a quick review of bare- metal virtualization environments versus environments based on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. Figure 1-1 compares a bare-metal application deployment to a virtualized one. You can see why virtualization has become so popular: Deploy- ing new virtual machines is dead simple, and you can share underlying hardware resources to do so. Prior to virtualization, FIGURE 1-1: Virtualization versus bare-metal servers.