Azure virtual machines vs containers

Question

Hello,

Can I just say in simple words,

Azure virtual machines are IaaS offerings because the customer has to handle the platform and the OS.

Azure containers are PaaS offerings because the customer doesn't have to worry about the platform and the OS.

As a result, it's easy to spin a container compared to a VM.

Regards

marouf

Answer 1

Hi Marouf Ali,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

Your understanding of Azure virtual machines (VMs) and containers is absolutely correct.

Azure Virtual Machines are classified as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This means customers are responsible for managing the entire virtual machine environment, including the operating system, middleware, and applications.

Complete Isolation: Each VM runs its own operating system, providing a high level of isolation between VMs. This is managed by a hypervisor, which allocates physical resources (CPU, memory, storage) to each VM.

Resource Allocation: VMs have dedicated resources that are not shared with other VMs. Each VM includes its own OS, which results in higher resource consumption compared to containers.

Management Responsibility: Users are responsible for maintaining the operating system, installing updates, and managing security patches, which requires more administrative overhead.

Azure Containers are considered Platform as a Service (PaaS). This model abstracts the underlying infrastructure management, allowing users to focus primarily on the application itself.

Shared Operating System: Containers share the host operating system's kernel but run in isolated user spaces. This allows multiple containers to be hosted on a single OS instance, making them lightweight and efficient.

Rapid Deployment: Containers can be started and stopped quickly compared to VMs because they do not require a full OS to boot. This allows for faster scaling of applications.

Reduced Resource Usage: Containers use fewer resources than VMs, enabling more instances to run on a single host. This leads to higher density and efficiency.

Please refer to this document for more information https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/about/containers-vs-vm

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