25.2 Container Uses and Advantages
The main advantage of containers is that they require considerably less resource overhead than virtualization allowing many container instances to be run simultaneously on a single server, and can be started and stopped rapidly and efficiently in response to demand levels. Containers run natively on the host system providing a level of performance that cannot be matched by a virtual machine.
Containers are also extremely portable and can be migrated between systems quickly and easily. When combined with a container management system such as Docker, OpenShift and Kubernetes, it is possible to deploy and manage containers on a vast scale spanning multiple servers and cloud platforms, potentially running thousands of containers.
Containers are frequently used to create lightweight execution environments for applications. In this scenario, each container provides an isolated environment containing the application together with all of the runtime...