Book Image

Containerization with LXC

Book Image

Containerization with LXC

Overview of this book

In recent years, containers have gained wide adoption by businesses running a variety of application loads. This became possible largely due to the advent of kernel namespaces and better resource management with control groups (cgroups). Linux containers (LXC) are a direct implementation of those kernel features that provide operating system level virtualization without the overhead of a hypervisor layer. This book starts by introducing the foundational concepts behind the implementation of LXC, then moves into the practical aspects of installing and configuring LXC containers. Moving on, you will explore container networking, security, and backups. You will also learn how to deploy LXC with technologies like Open Stack and Vagrant. By the end of the book, you will have a solid grasp of how LXC is implemented and how to run production applications in a highly available and scalable way.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Containerization with LXC
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Summary


The advent of kernel namespaces and cgroups made it possible to isolate groups of processes in a self-confined lightweight virtualization package; we call them containers. In this chapter, we saw how containers provide the same features as other full-fledged hypervisor-based virtualization technologies such as KVM and Xen, without the overhead of running multiple kernels in the same operating system. LXC takes full advantage of Linux cgroups and namespaces to achieve this level of isolation and resource control.

With the foundation gained from this chapter, you'll be able to understand better what's going on under the hood, which will make it much easier to troubleshoot and support the full life cycle of Linux containers, as we'll do in the next chapters.