Containers versus VMs

Hardware virtualization has enabled the possibility of running multiple isolated OS instances at the same time on physical hardware. As containers abstract the OS by virtualizing it, this enables several applications to be run using the same OS while still being isolated from each other. VMs, on the other hand, contain the full OS and files and essentially only abstract the hardware layer, whereas containers abstract the OS layer and contain your application files as well as configuration files and dependencies. Containers are much smaller in size and utilize fewer resources.

A hypervisor is the software, firmware, and hardware that enables VMs to be created and run. It is the layer that resides between the physical hardware and the software-implemented VM. New machines have virtualization instruction sets built into the processes and specialized hardware to enable VMs to run just as well as physical hardware and leverage physical hardware resources as native...