Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

Today, I would like to talk to you about the four reasons for retaining virtual machines, which may not be well understood by many people. in order to make you understand better, the editor has summarized the following for you. I hope you can get something from this article.

When evaluating options such as serverless and containers, you need to continue to consider the advantages of virtual machines.

People now live in an era when everything is native to the cloud, and the advantages of any virtual machine are easy to be ignored. Virtual machines are increasingly seen as a legacy technology that lacks the versatility and performance advantages of new solutions such as container and serverless capabilities. If enterprises are deploying applications today, they may prefer to deploy on the latter type of "next generation" platform rather than using boring existing virtual machines.

To some extent, this trend is fair. Compared with alternative forms of technology, virtual machines are less efficient solutions in many cases.

However, this does not mean that the virtual machine has completely failed. Just like today's bare metal environment (virtual machines helped virtual machines become "traditional" technology 20 years ago), there are still use cases, and there are still many good reasons to consider using virtual machines instead of containers, serverless functions, or virtual machines. Other new managed solutions.

Oppose the adoption of virtual machines

To explain why, first outline why virtual machines may not be the ideal choice compared to alternative hosting technologies.

The most common reasons to avoid virtual machines and choose things such as containers to host your applications are as follows:

Overhead: virtual machines consume more resources than containers.

Speed: in some ways, the virtual machine is slow. They take longer to start (maybe a minute or two, rather than a few seconds of a container). Because the resources of some host systems are consumed by virtualized hypervisors, the applications they host may not run too fast, so there are fewer resources available for applications.

Redundancy: virtual machines are designed on the assumption that each computer resides on a single server. Although you can create redundancy for virtual machines by distributing virtual machines across the server cluster, doing so requires more work-and a more clumsy process-than using containers to distribute applications in the cluster.

Large images: virtual machine images that contain the host operating system (in most cases) usually take up at least a few GB of space, maybe even more. By contrast, the container image may be only a few megabytes, because the container image does not have to package the complete operating system.

Native cloud: virtual machine is a technology that was widely used decades ago (that is, before the cloud age). So, unlike them, because virtual machines are not cloud native technologies, unlike container and serverless virtual machines, there is some cultural bias against them.

All these views are true and valid. For many modern application deployments, virtual machines are not an excellent choice.

The reason why virtual machines are still important

However, in many use cases, virtual machines stand out from the competition in a positive way. Consider the following reasons why you may want to keep your virtual machine and avoid the temptation to jump on containerized, cloud-native trends.

Flexibility

Flexibility is perhaps the biggest selling point of virtual machines, and in the end, they will still provide maximum deployment flexibility. Virtual machines can be deployed almost anywhere, regardless of their operating system or host configuration. Windows systems can host Linux-based virtual machines and vice versa.

Containers provide a degree of flexibility. Containerized Linux applications don't care which Linux distribution hosts it. However, unless you use a virtual machine to create other abstractions you need, you still cannot run the Linux container or the Windows container on Windows or Linux.

Security and isolation

Since the advent of Docker in 2013, the security of containers has been greatly improved. However, it is still worthy of attention. Indeed, security concerns are the main reason why some teams choose not to use containers.

As the container platform matures and more security tools are fully supported, these concerns may be alleviated. However, from a simple fact, containerized applications can never achieve the same degree of isolation from virtual machines, so from a security perspective, containers cannot exactly match virtual machines. Virtual machines do not share each other's kernel or other basic system resources like containers.

Container management

It is true that containers are more naturally suited to distributed host environments in many ways, but this feature also makes them more difficult to manage. When hundreds of containers are spread across dozens of servers, things quickly get out of control. This is why you use a business process coordinator such as Kubernetes to automate most of the administrative work. However, the coordinator itself adds another layer of complexity that you must set up, manage, and protect.

Large-scale virtual machine deployment also requires orchestration solutions. However, they are rarely as complex as container deployment. When using virtual machines, there are fewer moving parts and fewer overlapping layers of infrastructure.

The virtual machine is the original cloud

Finally, let's address the cultural bias against virtual machines. Virtual machines may be earlier than the cloud, but that doesn't mean they are new to the cloud. Virtual machine-based IaaS service is the first major cloud computing service launched by public cloud providers such as AWS in the mid-2000s. They are still a key part of the products provided by these providers.

After reading the above, do you have any further understanding of the four reasons for retaining virtual machines? If you want to know more knowledge or related content, please follow the industry information channel, thank you for your support.

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