Understanding the difference between virtual machines and containers
In recent times, cloud computing has become part of almost all technical discussions. Virtual machines have served a lot of people in utilizing resources efficiently. However, Docker containers have given them competition and, in fact, containers are more effective.
Let's find out the basic differences between both and find out the reason behind the popularity of containers:
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Virtual machines
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Containers
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In the virtual machine, we need to install an operating system with the appropriate device drivers; hence, the footprint or size of a virtual machine is huge. A normal VM with Tomcat and Java installed may take up to 10 GB of drive space:
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A container shares the operating system and device drivers of the host. Containers are created from images, and for a container with Tomcat installed, the size is less than 500 MB:
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There's an overhead of memory management and device drivers. A VM has all the components... |
