What are containers?

Containers are not revolutionary, ground-breaking concepts. They have been in action for quite a while. However, the world is witnessing the re-entry of containers, mainly due to the wide adoption of cloud computing. The shortcomings of traditional virtual machines in the cloud computing space also accelerated the use of containers. Container providers such as Docker simplified container technologies to a great extent, which also enabled a large adoption of container technologies in today's world. The recent popularity of DevOps and microservices also acted as a catalyst for the rebirth of container technologies.

So, what are containers? Containers provide private spaces on top of the operating system. This technique is also called operating system virtualization. In this approach, the kernel of the operating system provides isolated virtual spaces. Each of these virtual spaces is called a container or virtual engine (VE). Containers allow processes to run on an isolated...