Chapter: Multicore Application Programming For Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris : Identifying Opportunities for Parallelism
Using Containers to Isolate Applications Sharing a Single System
Using
Containers to Isolate Applications Sharing a Single System
One such
technology is containerization. The implementations depend on the particular
operating system, for example, Solaris has Zones, whereas FreeBSD has Jails,
but the concept is the same. A control container manages the host operating
system, along with a multitude of guest containers. Each guest container
appears to be a complete operating system instance in its own right, and an
application running in a guest container cannot see other applications on the
system either in other guest containers or in the control container. The guests
do not even share disk space; each guest container can appear to have its own
root directory system.
The
implementation of the technology is really a single instance of the operating
sys-tem, and the illusion of containers is maintained by hiding applications or
resources that are outside of the guest container. The advantage of this
implementation is very low overhead, so performance comes very close to that of
the full system. The disadvantage
is that
the single operating system image represents a single point of failure. If the
operat-ing system crashes, then all the guests also crash, since they also
share the same image. Figure 3.4 illustrates containerization.
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