The comparison swirls around a must needed conclusion as Containers have established to becomes the talk of the town these days and especially for the infrastructure team of any organization.
Now the answer that most of us are looking for is when containers are taken into comparison with Virtual Machines, which stands more efficient?
So, let’s dive deep to see how Virtual machine and container ecosystem evolve.
Virtual Machines once became the most cost efficient ways to set up a virtual environment reducing hardware cost. But, during recent times, the concept of containers are making headlines which proves to be a much more efficient way to set up your virtual environment.
Let me put forth the comparison of the Virtual machines and the containers under 2 headings- the host and the control plane.
The host level Analogy
The server’s form the base for a virtual machine architecture. The host (OS)operating system is then placed on top of the server over which the hypervisor is installed. Based on requirements, multiple numbers of guest (G)OS or the VMs are then created, on top of which applications are installed and are allowed to run.
Here the point to be focused is that every guest OS is isolated. It has its own bundles of libraries and applications running.
Containers, on the other hand, are built using similar architecture as that of a VM but varies on a very small scale in comparison to containers.
Instead of having a Hypervisor installed, multiple containers can be created using any container software(Con s/w) such as Docker, rkt or many other software available in the market. Here the containers created within the same host can run using a single guest OS itself, i.e; the guest operating system resources can be shared by the containers under the same host.
This makes containers a lot more lighter weight footprint, whereas the Virtual machines are considered heavy.
The host level analogy thus shows the reduction of the boot time taken by the containers as the entire guest OS needn’t be booted every time reducing the requirement to reproduce the OS code. While Virtual machine takes few minutes to boot, the containers can be booted almost instantly in a matter of few seconds.
The control plane analogy
Scalability needed at the control plane level of the virtual architecture is precisely well defined for the Virtual Machines. Other than vMotioning them for availability we cannot actually scale their state.
The containers stand on a stateless scalable control plane. The applications we will be able to deploy here scales around in the range of, what we call a “Twelve-Factor application”. Here again, containers take the lead in the race of efficient scalability.
Conclusion
Every point of discussion describes containers to be the most efficient way to build a Virtual infrastructure but before heading on to any final conclusion, a matter of fact to be understood is that Virtual machines hold their own significance.
In a scenario, where the requirement demands a variety of operating system to run multiple application then the best choice will definitely be a virtual machine. When the need is to have maximum applications run on minimum server then the choice of course switches to containers.
The bottom line and take away would be that, an ideal virtual environment setup includes both Virtual machines and the Containers.
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