How is a Docker container superior than a Virtual Machine

Virtualization is among the one the most useful & most used technologies in IT world. With the help virtualization, we can create virtual machines which are loaded with full OS capabilities with their own memory management, just like any regular OS on a dedicated physical server. With virtualization, we have the option to create as many as virtual machines as our system resources permit. Hypervisors are used to emulate resources for the virtual machines& they sit between the Os & hardware. Some of the famous hypervisors are ESX, Hyper-V, Xen etc.

But as it happens to any technology, virtualization is also seeing change, rather advancement in the form of Docker containers. In the last decade, containers are gaining more recognition & are now replacing our conventional virtual machines.

How is Docker container any different than the virtual machines ?

A Docker container provides a way to run multiple isolated systems on a single server or host. Each container shares kernel (& libraries also) of the host’s operating system. And since each container that is being used, shares OS with host, it makes docker containers very light in size. In-fact size of a Docker container can be in Megabytes (not GBs) & they load up extremely faster in mere seconds as compared to virtual machines that are GBs in size & takes minutes not seconds to load up.

Are Docker containers superior ?

• Dockers are resource friendly

Docker containers are used mainly for isolating of multiple applications & packing them into containers. Containers use shared operating systems & are much more efficient in managing system resources than virtual machine’s hypervisor. With containers, management overhead is also reduced, as they share a common operating system which means only a single operating system needs to taken care of. But with virtual machines this is not the case, each virtual machine has its own OS which needs to patched up, upgraded etc. With containers systems, we can have three to five times application instances running as compared to virtual machines.

•  Dockers are superfast

Containers are also faster when compared to virtual machines. A container can be easily created within seconds & can boot up in seconds while configuring a virtual machines takes time & booting also is much slower than the containers. Applications running on docker containers can be almost twice as fast as same application running on a virtual machine.
Container environment also makes it easy to transfer an application from one server to another, since only small size containers are to be transferred. Containers can also be shared & can be easily deployed in variety of public & private cloud which accelerates development & testing of application.

• Dockers saves money

All these advantages together provide another advantage, which is cost saving. With using Docker container, we end up saving lots of money of Hardware & other resources including manpower. MONEY SAVED IS MONEY EARNED.

Conclusion

Though virtualization in itself is a very useful & strong technology and is not going anywhere any time soon but with the rise of Docker container, there is certainly going to be decrease in its use & popularity. Containers have many advantages over our traditional virtual machines, which has caused many industry giants to adopt Docker containers leaving behind the virtual machines.