Application Contianer versus System Container

When people talk about containers, they usually mean application containers. Docker is automatically associated with application containers and is widely used to package applications and services. But there is another type of container: system containers. Let us look at the differences between application containers vs. system containers and see how each type of container is used: Application Containers  Application/service centric Growing tool ecosystem Security concerns Networking challenges Hampered by base OS limitations  System Containers Machine-centric Limited tool ecosystem Datacenter-centric Isolated & secure Optimized networking Application Containers Application containers are used to package applications without launching a virtual machine for each app or each service within an app. They are especially beneficial when making the move to a microservices architecture, as they allow you to create a separate container for each application component and provide greater control, security and process restriction. Ultimately, what you get from application containers is easier distribution. The risks of inconsistency, unreliability and compatibility issues are reduced significantly if an application is placed and shipped inside a container. Docker is currently the most widely adopted container service provider with a focus on application containers. However, there are other container technologies like CoreOS’s Rocket. Rocket promises better security, portability and flexibility of image sharing. Docker already enjoys the advantage of mass adoption, and Rocket might just be too late to the container party. Even with its differences, Docker is still the unofficial standard for application containers today. Docker Datacenter enables the deployment of containerized apps across multiple environments, from on-premises to virtual private cloud infrastructure. With Docker Datacenter you can provide a Containers as a Service (CaaS) environment for your teams. Deploying Docker Datacenter provides options for container deployment: On-premises. Docker can be deployed to on-premises datacenters. Virtual Private Cloud. Docker can be deployed to virtual private cloud environments including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Portability. With Docker, you retain control of where you deploy your app. As the use of containers increases and organizations deploy them more widely, the need for tools to manage containers across the infrastructure also increases. Orchestrating a cluster of containers is a competitive and rapidly evolving area, and many tools exist offering various feature sets. Container orchestration tools can be broadly defined as providing an enterprise-level framework for integrating and managing containers at scale. Such tools aim to simplify container management and provide a framework not only for defining initial container deployment but also for managing multiple containers as one entity -- for purposes of availability, scaling, and networking. Some container orchestration tools to know about include: Amazon ECS -- The Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) supports Docker containers and lets you run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Azure Container Service (ACS) -- ACS lets you create a cluster of virtual machines that act as container hosts along with master machines that are used to manage your application containers. Cloud Foundry’s Diego -- Diego is a container management system that combines a scheduler, runner, and health manager. It is a rewrite of the Cloud Foundry runtime. CoreOS Fleet -- Fleet is a container management tool that lets you deploy Docker containers on hosts in a cluster as well as distribute services across a cluster. Docker Swarm -- Docker Swarm provides native clustering functionality for Docker containers, which lets you turn a group of Docker engines into a single, virtual Docker engine. Docker Shipyard is a handy tool for people who love Docker Swarm, but wish it did even more. While Swarm focuses on container orchestration through the CLI, Docker Shipyard takes things further by letting you manage app images and container registries in addition to containers themselves. Plus, Shipyard offers a Web-based graphical front-end and a rich API in addition to a CLI. Google Container Engine -- Google Container Engine, which is built on Kubernetes, lets you run Docker containers on the Google Cloud platform. It schedules containers into the cluster and manages them based on user-defined requirements. Kubernetes -- Kubernetes is an orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling and manages workloads based on user-defined parameters. Mesosphere Marathon -- Marathon is a container orchestration framework for Apache Mesosthat is designed to launch long-running applications. It offers key features for running applications in a clustered environment. Additionally, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is focused on integrating the orchestration layer of the container ecosystem. The CNCF’s stated goal is to create and drive adoption of a new set of common container technologies, and it recently selected Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration tool as its first containerization technology. System Containers: How They’re Used System containers play a similar role to virtual machines, as they share the kernel of the host operating system and provide user space isolation. However, system containers do not use hypervisors. (Any container that runs an OS is a system container.) They also allow you to install different libraries, languages, and databases. Services running in each container use resources that are assigned to just that container. System containers let you run multiple processes at the same time, all under the same OS and not a separate guest OS. This lowers the performance impact, and provides the benefits of VMs, like running multiple processes, along with the new benefits of containers like better portability and quick startup times. Useful System Container Tools Joyent’s Triton is a Container as a Service that implements its proprietary OS called SmartOS. It not only focuses on packing apps into containers but also provides the benefits of added security, networking and storage, while keeping things lightweight, with very little performance impact. The key differentiator is that Triton delivers bare-metal performance. With Samsung’s recent acquisition of Joyent, it’s left to be seen how Triton progresses. Giant Swarm is a hosted cloud platform that offers a Docker-based virtualization system that is configured for microservices. It helps businesses manage their development stack, spend less time on operations setup, and more time on active development. LXD is a fairly new OS container that was released in 2016 by Canonical, the creators of Ubuntu. It combines the speed and efficiency of containers with the famed security of virtual machines. Since Docker and LXD share the same kernels, it is easy to run Docker containers inside LXD containers.