You can limit how much RAM is available to each one, so one app doesn’t eat all of your RAM. Same with CPU.

This can be done with containers and you don’t get the overhead of virtualizing a whole operating system for every service/app you might be hosting.

Virtual Machines can be backed up, uploaded to remote storage, and restored.

This can also be done with containers in a more elegant way as there’s no need to back up any VM/OS data.

E.g. I have a docker compose file that can nearly immediately stand up a container with the right settings/image, point it to my restored data and be up and running in no time. The best part is i don’t need to back up the container/OS because that data is irrelevant.

When it’s time to do a big update on your main machine (either changing OS or getting new hardware), restoring VM’s is super simple compared to the alternative.

With the alternative you just restore your data and run docker-compose up -d. Docker will handle the process of building, starting and managing the service.

Simple example: Your minecraft server died but you have backups. You just restore the data to /docker/minecraft. Then (to keep things really simple) you just run:

docker run -d -p 25565:25565 --name minecraft -e EULA=TRUE -v /docker/minecraft:/data itzg/minecraft-server

and in a few minutes your server is ready to go.