Virtualization vs. Containerization

Containers provide isolated runtime environments for applications: the entire user space environment is exclusively presented to the container, and any changes to it do not impact other containers' environments. To provide this isolation, a combination of OS-based mechanisms is used: Linux name spaces are used for isolation and scoping mechanism. File system mounts define what files are accessible to the container. cgroups define resource consumption of containers. Still all containers share the same OS kernel which can realize memory footprint efficiencies when identical libraries are used by multiple containers.

With system virtualization, the hypervisor provides a full virtual machine to a guest: the entire OS image including the kernel is now dedicated to the virtual machine. CPU virtualization is used to provide each guest with an exclusive view of a full system environment, and these mechanisms also ensure isolation from other guests. Hypervisor-based management of virtual CPUs, memory and I/O devices is used to define resource consumption of guests.

Which one is better?