Differences Between Virtual Machines (VM) and Containers

Author: Abhay Reddy

As the application container and virtual machine market continue to grow, there has been a tremendous interest in how they differ, and which of them is the better approach for specific projects. The keyword ‘virtual machines vs containers’ was searched 2400 times (on average) per month in the US alone [source: Google]

Image: Containers and Virtual Machine Statistics. Source [1], [2], [3], [4]

Virtual Machine provides an abstraction of the physical hardware. A Hypervisor allows multiple Virtual Machines (VM) to run on a single server. Each VM has a full copy of OS, app binaries, and libraries

Containers provide abstraction at the application layer. Code and all dependencies are packaged together so that an application can run across platforms such as desktop, data center, and cloud. Each container runs as an isolated process while sharing the same OS kernel.

Image: Virtualization vs Containers

The table below explores the key differences between the two approaches.

Image: Virtualization vs Containers Comparison Table

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