Containers

Tags

sys-design

Are effectively lightweight virtual machines that can be initialised from a container image. Containers remove the overhead of unnecessary system components such as hardware emulation and instead expose the bare minimum of the underlying OS to get a working containerised system.

Containers offer:

• Resource isolation: the memory, file-system and network stack or all isolated from the rest of the system.
• Effortless parallelisation: you can spin up multiple containers on a single machine and dedicate them to running a specific process or service. This allows you to deploy updates to entire clusters instead of individual machines.