Understanding the difference between virtual machines and containers

Virtual machines host a variety of workloads, from SSH servers and monitoring to identity management, and have been the way to run programs and deploy applications for the last decades instead of using physical computers. One of the top benefits of using virtual machines in previous years was providing isolation from the host operating system.

This was useful in establishing security boundaries to host applications on the same server or cluster.

While each virtual machine runs its own operating system, it requires additional computing resources, such as CPU, memory, and storage. Also, as organizations expanded their on-premises footprint based on virtual machines, the complexity of managing them at scale not only became an operational issue but also meant a very costly expense.

The advent of cloud computing impacted how applications are designed. Organizations tried to adopt microservices, a single-tiered...