Containers or Virtualisation ? Why not both !
Abstract
The concept of virtualisation has been around for more than four decades. As it has matured over time, it has enabled many organisations to realise more efficiency in how they use their existing hardware resources. Virtualisation is a technology which enables multiple guest virtual machines to run on the same underlying hardware which wasn’t possible previously. Benchmarking tests conducted using industry standard tools have proven virtualisation has its benefits across various scenarios no matter which hypervisor is used. Containers are revolutionising the virtualisation segment yet again. Whereas traditional virtualisation abstracted the underlying hardware, containers are abstracting the operating system thereby enabling enterprises to speed up application development. However due to this technology still in its early stages, benchmarking tests have shown containers have some disadvantages over hardware virtualisation especially around the security aspect. This raises the prospect of whether virtualisation and containers can co-exist in the same environment. This hybrid virtualisation technique would leverage the security aspect of virtualisation with the agility of containers to deploy applications securely. The approach of hybrid -virtualisation (running containers inside virtual machines) is relatively new and therefore comprehensive benchmarking tests and robust implementations are still being explored. Hybrid virtualisation is the next logical step towards leveraging both technologies and if implemented correctly, could see greater efficiencies realised.
Justification: My specialisation for this Masters degree has been in Cloud Computing and Virtualisation.