Introduction to Amazon ECS and Kubernetes

So far, we have been looking at hardware virtualization and using hypervisors to build VMs such as EC2 instances that we can run various applications on. Different applications often have specific requirements, and many applications will not be able to run together in the same VM due to incompatibility with the underlying libraries or runtime environments.

Traditional virtualization technologies involve using bare-metal hardware, upon which you configure a hypervisor. This hypervisor, as we discussed previously, allows you to essentially carve out physical hardware components (CPU, memory, storage, and so on) into smaller virtual components that allow you to then deploy VMs, or in the case of AWS, EC2 instances. Each EC2 instance, however, will need to host a guest operating system (Linux or Windows, for example), shared libraries and system files, and your application.

As shown in the following diagram, VMs take up a lot of resources...