Container

With containers, instead of virtualizing the underlying computer like a [virtual-machine], just the OS is virtualized.

Containers sit on top of a physical server and its host OS — typically Linux or Windows. Each container shares the host OS kernel and, usually, the binaries and [library], too. Shared components are read-only. Sharing OS resources such as libraries significantly reduces the need to reproduce the operating system code, and means that a server can run multiple workloads with a single operating system installation. Containers are thus exceptionally light — they are only megabytes in size and take just seconds to start. Compared to containers, VMs take minutes to run and are an order of magnitude larger than an equivalent container.

[docker] have more or less become the de facto standard for building and running containers.

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