What distinguishes containers from virtual machines in terms of infrastructure and resources?

Containers and virtual machines (VMs) differ in their level of isolation and resource usage:

• Virtual Machines run a full guest operating system on top of a hypervisor. Each VM contains the OS kernel, libraries, and applications, which requires significant resources (CPU, memory, disk).
• Containers share the host OS kernel and isolate applications at the process level using kernel mechanisms (namespaces, cgroups). Containers are lighter and faster to start, using fewer resources, as they do not duplicate the OS.

In summary: containers are lightweight application isolation with lower overhead, while VMs provide full virtualization with a complete OS, requiring more resources and time to start.