Release It!, 2nd Edition

Physical Hosts, Virtual Machines, and Containers

At some level, all machines are the same. Eventually, all our software runs on some piece of precisely patterned silicon. All our data winds up on glass platters of spinning rust or encoded in minute charges on NAND gates. That’s where the similarity ends. A bewildering array of deployment options force us to think about the machines’ identities and lifespans. These aren’t just packaging issues, either. A design that works nicely in a physical data center environment may cost too much or fail utterly in a containerized cloud environment. In this section, we’ll look at these deployment options and how they affect software architecture and design for each kind of environment.

Physical Hosts

The ...