Scaling applications with LXC

LXC is pretty well-suited for virtual machine replacement in sense that it can contain a complete root filesystem for a Linux distribution, in which case, the only shared component with the host OS is the kernel. Applications can be installed in the container's root filesystem so that the host or other containers cannot share them. This isolation is useful if we want to run different versions of the same application and its dependencies, or different Linux distributions altogether.

On the other hand, libvirt LXC allows for the execution of a single process or a group of processes from a binary which is shared from the host OS by all containers. In this case, the containers share the host filesystem and only abstract certain directories. This helps in scenarios where the application might not need its own dedicated filesystem, if, for example, the Linux distribution in the container is the same as the host OS. Scaling such applications is a matter of ensuring...