Modern Linux applications can be deployed on dedicated hardware, containers, Virtual Machines (VMs), or the cloud. Each solution has strengths and weaknesses, and each of them can be configured and maintained with scripts as well as GUIs.
A container is ideal if you want to deploy many copies of a single application where each instance needs its own copy of data. For example, containers work well with database-driven web servers where each server needs the same web infrastructure but has private data.
However, the downside of a container is that it relies on the host system's kernel. You can run multiple Linux distributions on a Linux host, but you can't run Windows in a container.
Using a VM is your best bet if you need a complete environment that is not the same for all instances. With VMs, you can run Windows and Linux on a single host. This is ideal for validation testing when you don...
