Technical Differences Between Virtualization and Containerization

Virtualization and containerization are both crucial technologies in the modern IT landscape, enabling efficient resource utilization, enhanced scalability, and flexible management of computing environments. However, they operate on different levels of the system architecture and have distinct technical characteristics. This comprehensive analysis explores the technical differences between virtualization and containerization, covering aspects such as architecture, resource management, performance, security, and use cases. 1. Architecture and Layering The core architectural difference between virtualization and containerization lies in how they abstract computing resources and manage operating systems. Virtualization : Virtualization abstracts the physical hardware of a machine and enables multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on a single physical host. Each VM includes its own full-fledged operating system (OS), a set of libraries, and the applications it runs. The hypervisor, a ...