Introduction

Containers are quite an old technology and existed in the form of chroot and FreeBSD Jails. Most of us have already used containers in some form or other. The rise of Docker gave containers the required adoption and popularity. Ubuntu has also released a new tool named LXD with Ubuntu 15.04.

A container is a lightweight virtual environment that contains a process or set of processes. You might already have used containers with chroot. Just as with containers, we create an isolated virtual environment to group and isolate a set of processes. The processes running inside the container are isolated from the base operating system environment, as well as other containers running on the same host. Such processes cannot access or modify anything outside the container. A recent development in the Linux kernel to support namespaces and cgroups has enabled containers to provide better isolation and resource-management capabilities.

One of the reasons for the widespread adoption of containers...