Virtualization vs Kubernetes

“How should I think about virtualization vs containers?” comes up quite often, but it is hard to answer without further qualification. The original appeal of virtualization technology was to consolidate workloads to fewer servers, i.e. to increase infrastructure utilization and reduce infrastructure-related CAPEX. Containers do the same thing, only better. Therefore, they should replace virtual machines, right? Well, yes and no.

The meaning of “virtualization” has been expanded in recent years. It’s not just servers that are virtualized, we now have software-defined (virtual) networks, virtual storage, virtual load balancers, etc. Your entire environment can be virtualized and defined via a configuration file, sometimes as part of your application packaging. If that’s the world you live in, congratulations, you are living in a cloud-native world.

#kubernetes