What is the difference between virtualization and containerization?

The main difference between virtualization and containerization lies in the level of isolation and the way resources are used:

• Virtualization creates full virtual machines with their own operating system on top of a hypervisor. Each VM is isolated and has its own resources (CPU, memory, disk space). This provides strong isolation but requires more resources and time to start.

• Containerization uses OS kernel features (such as Linux namespaces and cgroups) to isolate processes within containers, which share a single kernel and OS. Containers are lighter and start faster, using fewer resources, but the isolation is less strict than in VMs.

Example: Docker is a popular tool for containerization, while VMware or KVM are used for virtualization.