Containers and Virtual Machines at Scale

TLDR

Virtualization decouples applications from hardware, with hardware and OS‑level virtualization enabling this, and containers—an OS‑level approach—have recently surged in use. The paper investigates the differences between hardware virtualization and containerization. The authors compare containers and virtual machines in large data centers across performance, manageability, and software development dimensions.

Abstract

Virtualization is used in data center and cloud environments to decouple applications from the hardware they run on. Hardware virtualization and operating system level virtualization are two prominent technologies that enable this. Containers, which use OS virtualization, have recently surged in interest and deployment. In this paper, we study the differences between the two virtualization technologies. We compare containers and virtual machines in large data center environments along the dimensions of performance, manageability and software development.