Operating System containers

Devops

What if you could run a linux VM inside your linux machine on your favorite cloud provider?

What is an OS container?

I won’t bore you with definitions. To over simplify, imagine a OS container to be a full linux VM inside a container. You can even see it boot.

Why use an OS container?

  • Isolation
  • Light weight
  • Persistant by default
  • A use and throw environment that you can easily create and delete
  • Run a different distro in a disto. Like run a centos container in an ubuntu VM
  • You can even run docker inside a OS container
  • Most applications are dockerized, but many still are not. So why bother dockerizing the application when you can create a OS container and use the normal installation methods?

How?

The two popular tools for managing system cntainers are LXC/LXD from Ubuntu and systemd-nspawn from well, systemd.