Recent developments show that clouds in future need to be more than just farms of virtual machines



From V3:

This week has seen a number of announcements relating to cloud computing from leading vendors in the field such as Red Hat, Canonical and the OpenStack project. And one subject that kept cropping up each time was Containers.

Containers have been around for some time, but seem to be garnering a lot more attention lately. The basic concept is to partition off some of a server's resources in order to create an isolated instance, somewhat akin to a virtual machine.

Unlike virtualisation, a number of Containers rely on the same host operating system for services. Containers can be thought of as separate instances of whichever operating system is installed on the host server.

  Parallels and Red Hat Containers could take cloud to new heights