While virtual machines are an excellent way to reduce costs versus the investments that are necessary for physical hardware, they’re still limited to a single operating system per virtual machine. If you want to run multiple instances of an application on a single host machine, containers are an excellent choice.
What are containers?
Containers are a virtualization environment. Much like running multiple virtual machines on a single physical host, you can run multiple containers on a single physical or virtual host. Unlike virtual machines, you don’t manage the operating system for a container. Virtual machines appear to be an instance of an operating system that you can connect to and manage. Containers are lightweight and designed to be created, scaled out, and stopped dynamically. It’s possible to create and deploy virtual machines as application demand increases, but containers are a lighter weight, more agile method. Containers are designed to allow you to respond to changes on demand. With containers, you can quickly restart if there’s a crash or hardware interruption. One of the most popular container engines is Docker, and Azure supports Docker.
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