Containers
And Why To Love Them
Types of container
- LXC
- OpenVZ
- BSD Jails
What Are They and Why Do I Care?
- Low overhead
- Process isolation
- Ease of maintenance
- Portable, repeatable environment
- Sandbox for experimentation/development
What About Xen/VMWare?
- No need to emulate hardware with special drivers
- Lower resource overhead
- Fewer moving parts, abstraction layers
- Restricted to using same type of OS
How Do They Work?
- Kernel level process isolation
- Chrooted file system
- Restricted access to system resources
- Uses the same kernel as the host
How Do I Get Started?
- LXC is built into the Linux kernel
- Userspace tools installed via package manager
- OpenVZ kernel modules available via RPM
- Web interfaces available for both options
- Docker useful as high level interface to LXC
LXC vs OpenVZ
- LXC built into linux kernel
- OpenVZ is a kernel add-on
- OpenVZ supports live migration
- OpenVZ supports better security isolation
- LXC allows for limiting disk I/O
- OpenVZ supports more distribution templates
Use Cases
- Throwaway development environment
- Sandbox for system experimentation
- Low resource cost system virtualization
- Run multiple distributions on one machine
Links
Linux Containers
By blarghmatey
