Discover containers (e.g., Docker) and how they differ from VMs.
Containers represent another form of OS-level virtualization that has gained immense popularity with the rise of microservices. A container is a lightweight, standalone, executable package that includes an application and all its dependencies—code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. Unlike VMs, which virtualize the entire hardware stack, containers virtualize the operating system. This means all containers on a given host share the host's OS kernel but run in isolated user spaces. The leading containerization platform is Docker. The key difference and advantage of containers over VMs is their efficiency and speed. Since they don't include a full guest OS, they are much smaller in size (megabytes instead of gigabytes), which means they can be started almost instantly. This lightweight nature allows for much higher density; you can run many more containers than VMs on the same physical hardware. This portability and consistency are also major benefits. A containerized application will run the same way regardless of the environment it's deployed in—a developer's laptop, a test server, or a production cloud environment. This solves the classic 'it works on my machine' problem and streamlines the development-to-production pipeline.