Docker and Containers - VMs vs Containers

VMs and containers are fundamentally different technologies.

VM Stack

The interface for VM sits on top of Hypervisor between OS and Physical infrastructure.

OS talks to a ubiquitous virtual hardware layer with less overhead. VM can be sized to whatever you want without limitation of physical infrastructure.

Hypervisor is responsible to interact with all types of hardware.

Container Stack

OS works as a container host and is slimmed down with OS dependencies packed into containers. Apps get isolated from OS by containers. However, without Hypervisor and VM, OS has to take the responsibility to interact with the physical infrastructure.

Written by Warren who studies distributed systems at George Washington University. You might wanna follow him on Github