A Historical Look at Containers vs Virtual Machines and Their Evolution

Although discussing containers vs VMs may seem outdated in 2018, the article revisits their historical rivalry as background for modern Kubernetes.

It recounts early 2000s deployment practices before virtualization, describing manual checklists, server naming, and the painstaking process of maintaining physical servers.

A code example shows the typical container removal command: docker rm -f $(docker ps -qa).

The article explains virtualization basics: hypervisors abstract hardware, allowing multiple VMs on a single host, which solved application conflicts but introduced resource overhead and slower startup.

Containers are presented as a solution that shares the OS kernel while providing isolation, effectively returning deployment to a bare‑metal style but with lightweight isolation.

Security drawbacks of Linux containers are discussed, such as shared kernel vulnerabilities, and the article notes Microsoft’s Hyper‑V container approach that adds a lightweight VM layer for better isolation.

Finally, the piece promotes a DevOpsLIVE live broadcast on Windows‑Linux containers and Azure Kubernetes, including QR codes and registration details.