• Traditional deployment era: Early on, organizations ran applications on physical servers. There was no way to define resource boundaries for applications in a physical server, and this caused resource allocation issues. For example, if multiple applications run on a physical server, there can be instances where one application would take up most of the resources, and as a result, the other applications would underperform. A solution for this would be to run each application on a different physical server. But this did not scale as resources were underutilized, and it was expensive for organizations to maintain many physical servers.

  • Virtualized deployment era: As a solution, virtualization was introduced. It allows you to run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single physical server's CPU. Virtualization allows applications to be isolated between VMs and provides a level of security as the information of one application cannot be freely accessed by another application.

Virtualization allows better utilization of resources in a physical server and allows better scalability because an application can be added or updated easily, reduces hardware costs, and much more. With virtualization you can present a set of physical resources as a cluster of disposable virtual machines.

Each VM is a full machine running all the components, including its own operating system, on top of the virtualized hardware.

  • Container deployment era: Containers are similar to VMs, but they have relaxed isolation properties to share the Operating System (OS) among the applications. Therefore, containers are considered lightweight. Similar to a VM, a container has its own filesystem, share of CPU, memory, process space, and more. As they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.

  • 传统部署时代：

早期，各机构是在物理服务器上运行应用程序。 由于无法限制在物理服务器中运行的应用程序资源使用，因此会导致资源分配问题。 例如，如果在物理服务器上运行多个应用程序， 则可能会出现一个应用程序占用大部分资源的情况，而导致其他应用程序的性能下降。 一种解决方案是将每个应用程序都运行在不同的物理服务器上， 但是当某个应用程式资源利用率不高时，剩余资源无法被分配给其他应用程式， 而且维护许多物理服务器的成本很高。

  • 虚拟化部署时代：

因此，虚拟化技术被引入了。虚拟化技术允许你在单个物理服务器的 CPU 上运行多台虚拟机（VM）。 虚拟化能使应用程序在不同 VM 之间被彼此隔离，且能提供一定程度的安全性， 因为一个应用程序的信息不能被另一应用程序随意访问。

虚拟化技术能够更好地利用物理服务器的资源，并且因为可轻松地添加或更新应用程序， 而因此可以具有更高的可伸缩性，以及降低硬件成本等等的好处。

每个 VM 是一台完整的计算机，在虚拟化硬件之上运行所有组件，包括其自己的操作系统（OS）。

  • 容器部署时代：

容器类似于 VM，但是更宽松的隔离特性，使容器之间可以共享操作系统（OS）。 因此，容器比起 VM 被认为是更轻量级的。且与 VM 类似，每个容器都具有自己的文件系统、CPU、内存、进程空间等。 由于它们与基础架构分离，因此可以跨云和 OS 发行版本进行移植。