Containers from First Principles
A container feels like a lightweight virtual machine, but it isn't one — there's no guest OS, no hypervisor, no virtualization. A container is just a normal process that the Linux kernel has been told to isolate and constrain. Understanding that — namespaces for isolation, cgroups for limits, images for packaging — demystifies containers and everything Kubernetes builds on them.
A container feels like a lightweight virtual machine, but it isn't one — no guest OS, no hypervisor, no virtualization. A container is just a normal process the Linux kernel has been told to isolate (namespaces) and constrain (cgroups).