How does using virtual machines differ from deploying containers in infrastructure?

Virtual machines (VMs) and containers are application isolation technologies, but they operate at different levels and have different characteristics.

• Virtual machines run a full guest operating system on top of a hypervisor. Each VM has its own OS kernel, libraries, and applications. This provides strong isolation but requires more resources (memory, CPU, disk).

• Containers use the host OS kernel and isolate applications at the process level using technologies like cgroups and namespaces. Containers are lighter and faster to start, take up less space, but their isolation is less strict than VMs.

Example: if you need to run several applications with different OSes, it's better to use VMs. If you need to quickly scale microservices with the same OS, containers are more convenient.

Thus, the main difference is the level of isolation and resource consumption: VMs are heavier but more isolated; containers are lighter, faster, but with less isolation.