CHAPTER 26Shifting to Clouds and Containers
While most of this book focuses on installing and managing individual servers, services, and applications, this chapter takes you into the technologies needed to bring Linux into large data centers. For a data center to operate efficiently, its computers must become as generic as possible, and running components must become more automated. In this chapter, we’ll focus on technologies that make those two things happen.
Understanding Virtualization
Computers become more generic by separating the applications from the operating systems. This means not just packaging applications into things you install on an operating system (like Debian packages), but also putting together sets of software into packages that themselves can run once they are delivered in ways that keep them separate from the operating system. Virtual machines (VMs) and containers are two ways of packaging sets of software and their dependencies in ways that are ready to run.
From a high level, a virtual machine is a complete operating system that runs on another operating system, allowing you to have many VMs active at a time on one physical computer. Everything an application or a service needs to run can ...
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