Cloud Computing Questions
The main difference between hypervisor and containerization is the level of virtualization they provide.
Hypervisor, also known as virtual machine monitor (VMM), is a software or hardware layer that enables the creation and management of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. Each VM runs its own operating system (OS) and applications, completely isolated from each other. Hypervisors provide full hardware virtualization, allowing different OSes to run simultaneously on the same server.
On the other hand, containerization is a lightweight form of virtualization that allows multiple isolated user-space instances, known as containers, to run on a single host OS. Containers share the host OS kernel and libraries, making them more efficient and faster to start compared to VMs. They provide application-level virtualization, where each container runs its own processes and has its own isolated file system, but shares the underlying OS resources.
In summary, hypervisors provide full OS virtualization with separate instances of OSes running on a single server, while containerization provides application-level virtualization with multiple isolated containers running on a shared host OS.