How Containerization is different than Virtualization?

Multiple, independent services may be deployed on a single platform using containers and virtualization.

Despite the differences and similarities between them, containers and virtual machines (VMs) both increase IT efficiency, offer application mobility, and improve DevOps and the software development lifecycle.

Virtualization

Virtualization refers to run multiple operating systems on a single machine at the same time. Virtualization is made feasible by a layer of software known as a “hypervisor.”

In a virtual machine, dependencies, libraries, and configurations are encapsulated. It is an operating system that makes use of a server’s shared resources. They are separated from one another and have their own infrastructure. VM runs software on different OS without additional hardware.

Hypervisor Types

Type 1 or Bare-Metal Hypervisor

A Type 1 hypervisor runs directly on the host machine’s physical hardware, and it’s referred to as a bare-metal hypervisor. The Type 1 hypervisor doesn’t have to load an underlying OS. With direct access to the underlying hardware and no other software — such as OSes and device drivers — to contend with for virtualization, Type 1 hypervisors are regarded as the most efficient and best-performing hypervisors available for enterprise computing.

For Example: VMware vSphere/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc.…

Type 2 or Hosted Hypervisor

A Type 2 hypervisor is typically installed on top of an existing OS. It is sometimes called a hosted hypervisor because it relies on the host machine’s preexisting OS to manage calls to CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

For Example: VMware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, etc.…

Containerization

Containerization packages up code and dependencies for the application to run quickly from one environment to another.

Containerization could also be termed as OS level virtualization. Put simply, they leverage features of the host operating system to isolate processes and control the processes’ access to CPUs, memory and desk space.

It generates several workloads on a single OS instance and wraps an application in a container with its own OS. It does not require any extra settings to be installed on any host system.

Comparison

When to use what ?

• When opting microservice architecture choosing containerization over virtualization resonates well because rather than spinning up an entire virtual machine, containerization packages together everything needed to run a single application or microservice.
• When you require total isolation of application running on the server, you should opt for virtualization.
• Containers are also ideal for automation and DevOps pipelines, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) implementation.
• In the era of multi-cloud solutions, applications might need to be migrated from one cloud vendor to another. Containerizing applications provides teams the portability they need to handle the many software environments & different platforms of modern IT.
• Dependency Hell: The dependency issue arises when several packages have dependencies on the same shared packages or libraries, but they depend on different and incompatible versions of the shared packages.
  To avoid dependency hell containerization proves to be the best bet!

Conclusion:

Here in this post we have covered what is Virtualization and Containerization, what are it’s uses, and how to differentiate between them at different use-cases.

If you need help with DevOps practices, or AWS at your company, feel free to reach out to us at Opsnetic.