Python for DevOps

Chapter 11. Container Technologies: Docker and Docker Compose

Virtualization technologies have been around since the days of the IBM mainframes. Most people have not had a chance to work on a mainframe, but we are sure some readers of this book remember the days when they had to set up or use a bare-metal server from a manufacturer such as HP or Dell. These manufacturers are still around today, and you can still use bare-metal servers hosted in a colocation facility, like in the good old days of the dot-com era.

When most people think of virtualization, however, they do not automatically have a mainframe in mind. Instead, they most likely imagine a virtual machine (VM) running a guest operating system (OS) such as Fedora or Ubuntu on top of a hypervisor such as VMware ESX or Citrix/Xen. The big advantage of VMs over regular bare-metal servers is that by using VMs, you can optimize the server’s resources (CPU, memory, disk) by splitting them across several virtual machines. You can also run several operating systems, each in its own VM, on top of one shared bare-metal server, instead of buying a dedicated server per targeted OS. Cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2 would not have been possible without hypervisors and virtual machines. This type of virtualization can be called kernel-level because each virtual machine runs its own OS kernel.

In the never-ending quest for more bang for their buck, people realized that virtual machines were still wasteful in terms of resources. ...