Traditional Deployment VS Virtualization VS Container

1. Traditional Deployment

History of running a software Traditional Deployment

• Early on, organizations ran applications on physical servers.
• Install or use an existing operating system.
• Install the tools & dependencies needed by your software.
• Run your application on it.

Problem with Traditional Deployment

• Resource Isolation issue, there is no way to define resource boundaries for applications in a physical server.
• Scaling issues for specific applications and long downtime.
• Overutilization of resources for a specific app can crash the entire physical server.
• It was expensive for organizations to maintain many physical servers.

Now to Overcome this problem, a virtual machine was introduced.

2. Virtual Machine

Virtual Machine

• Virtualization allows you to run multiple VMs on a single physical server.
• Each VM includes a full copy of an operating system, the application, necessary binaries, and libraries.
• Virtualization allows more effortless adding and updating of applications that solve the scalability issue.
• Virtualization allows better utilization of resources.
• Virtualization isolates applications between VMs.

Virtual Machine is great but there are a few problems.

• Operating system images are heavyweight, image size in GB.
• Contain guest OS for each virtual machine.
• It is a slow-to-boot-up process.
• Application is not portable
• Not scalable according to the requirement.
• Spin up a virtual machine may take 1–2 minutes.

Docker container was introduced in 2013 to solve this problem.

3. Docker Containers

Docker Containers

• The process of virtualizing the operating system produces containers.
• A container is an abstraction at the OS layer that packages code and dependencies together.
• Containers take up less space than VMs, boots quickly.
• Containers use underlying hardware so no wastage of resources.
• Containers are very lightweight and very fast and can spin up a few seconds or milliseconds.
• Docker containers are process-isolated and don’t require a hardware hypervisor.
• Containers are highly portable.
• Containers are highly scalable with the help of orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm which helps to create and manage docker containers.