Comparing - Containers and Virtual Machines

Being Computer scientist and worked in telecom/wireless infrastructure provider industry for long time, it is hard to forget those days, where we purchased hardware and built out own clusters, then install O/S on each of the machines, installed tools  and then our software. We mostly sold these as one package to customers. 

While wireless/wireline switch vendors and many vendors(IBMs of the world) still do that, we also have successfully separated computing resource providers, O/S/tools providers and Application providers.

In last decade, as number of Enterprise application providers increase and SaaS offerings grew, we saw growth of VMwares to Amazon to other cloud computing providers and virtualization frameworks. 

Then came growth of big data and need for "real" distributed computing.

As you can see, we have come a long way.

I thought with new container technologies like Docker etc, it is important to understand the differences.

Please check this article from docker site gives good idea : 

https://www.docker.com/what-container