Containers quite drastically vary from the highly visible and viable virtual machines (VMs). Virtual machines represent hardware virtualization whereas containers facilitate operating system-level virtualization. Some literature points out that virtual machines are system or OS containers whereas containers typically stand for application containers.

On the functional side, containers are like VMs, but there are dissimilar in many other ways. Like virtual machines, containers too share the various system resources such as processing, memory, storage, etc. The key difference is that all containers in a host machine share the same OS kernel of the host operating system.

Though there is heavy sharing, containers intrinsically maintain a high isolation by keeping applications, runtimes, and other associated services separated from each other using the recently incorporated kernel features such as namespaces and cgroups.

On the resource provisioning front, application...