Containerization

Containerization is a form of virtualization where an operating system (OS) allows the existence of multiple separate user spaces referred to as containers. Whereas virtualization is software-centric technology that separates the physical computing environment from the software stack that runs on a system, allowing several instances of operating systems to operate concurrently and independently on a single system.

Containerization is a cloud computing technology that involves logically decoupling an application from its underlying environment so that the containerized application can be developed, deployed and run consistently in different platforms in a portable manner. Moreover, Containerization technology is based on the notion of eliminating the need of operating system (OS) duplication in a virtual machine (VM) observed in virtualization techniques. In virtualization platforms, an application or system employs a hypervisor installed onto the hardware of the host server and then operates a full guest OS with each VM. And each virtual machine (VM) often supports only a single system or application to run on top the guest OS. With adoption of Kubernetes and other containerization platforms, cloud computing users will be able to develop and deploy applications besides to seamlessly moving and running them from one environment to another platform. A common example of container is Kubernetes, which is an Open source platform used for managing containerized workloads in an environment.

Containerization concepts share many of the security concerns observed in virtualization technologies. Thus, access to containerized environments must be strictly controlled, monitored and the origin of container images must be validated and be from trusted sources to ensure that they have not been improperly modified by malicious entities.

The difference between virtualization and containerization include the following:

• In virtualization technologies, one physical machine hosts multiple operating systems residing on it and looks as collection of multiple machines. Whereas in containerization platforms, the applications and systems are developed in the same host machine with the same operating system making it to run on multiple platforms flawlessly.
• In virtualization environment, hypervisors mainly virtualize the underlying hardware, whereas in containerization platforms, the containers virtualize the operating system (OS).
• Virtual machines (VMs) in virtualization platforms are a virtual copy of the host server deployed on its own operating system. Besides, virtual machines are resource-heavy and thus makes the applications and applications slower. Whereas in containerization environments, applications and systems run faster than those running in virtualization platforms.
• Due to resource-heaviness of virtual platforms, it takes much time to start than containerization environments.
• Virtualization platforms are larger in size or heavier than containerization environments and are less portable as well.