What's the difference between a microVM and a container?

Containers and microVMs both isolate applications, but containers share a host kernel through Linux namespaces and cgroups, whereas microVMs use hardware virtualization and a dedicated kernel per workload. Containers offer millisecond startup times, minimal memory overhead, and near-native performance, making them suitable for trusted web services, APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tools, while microVMs provide a stronger security boundary for untrusted code, AI agents, browser automation, code interpreters, and multi-tenant applications at modest additional startup and memory cost. Firecracker, Kata Containers, and gVisor represent different approaches to increasing workload isolation, with Kata enabling OCI-compatible containers to run inside lightweight VMs and gVisor using a userspace kernel sandbox. The recommended approach is often to combine these technologies, using efficient standard containers for trusted workloads and stronger sandboxing for higher-risk tasks. Northflank presents its platform as a unified control plane for running containers, Firecracker microVMs, Kata Containers, and gVisor alongside deployment, security, database, GPU, and infrastructure-management capabilities.

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