Containers vs Virtual Machines: Key Differences, Benefits, and Use Cases Explained
1 min read
Summary
This member-exclusive story provides a detailed comparison between containers and virtual machines and explains the benefits and use cases for both.
Containers are a standardised unit of software that wrap an application with everything it needs to run including code, runtime, libraries, environment variables and config files thereby allowing it to be run anywhere.
Virtual machines on the other hand are digital versions of physical computers that can be used to run applications and process data with each VM performing as though it were a single physical device.
VMs are more heavily weighted and computationally expensive to run whereas containers are more lightweight and therefore more flexible and scalable.
Containers also provide more efficient and rapid deployment and allow for the seamless migration to cloud environments.