I don’t have a computer science background and I often hear people talk about containers and Kubernetes. I frankly have no idea what it is and how it is different from a virtual machine (remote computer). Would like to understand what this is and why it is useful.
In: 1
Not really something I can explain to a 5 year old but, virtual machines create an entire virtual computer including software and hardware such as hard drives, operating systems, keyboards, network cards, sound cards, etc. Thats a lot of stuff to virtualize so it can be pretty slow and intense to have many of them at once.
Containers only virtualize the software they are told to run. It doesn’t virtualize any hardware like hard drives, or network cards. It just uses the actual host hardware. It doesn’t even virtualize an operating system. This means containers can only run the same OS as the host. If you are running a container in a windows system, the containers will also be windows systems. Because of this, containers are a lot faster.
Essentially a host creates a sandbox (the container) and says you can use the tools in my (the host) sandbox to make your sandcastle, but keep your sandcastles out of my sandbox.
Kubernetes is just a program to manage those container sandboxes. Does the sandbox need to be bigger? Does it need more tools? Does it just need more sandboxes? You would accomplish these in Kubernetes. It gives a graphical user interface which is easier than writing long commands in a terminal for every change.
Latest Answers