Are containers suitable for VPS hosting?

1

Hi guys

I am new to containers and want to know if they are suitable to VPS hosting. I have used KVM before. How secure and isolated are containers ? Are they more secure than VMs ?

Thanks
Kitty

2

Your question and answer:

  1. Can LXD be used for VPN Hosting?
    Ans: Yes it can and there are few providers using it. You just need to be careful while settings it up in such a way that each customer gets their own network address and isolation. Its similar to the way you do for a VM.

    You can first try LXD Cluster directly which supports both container or VM. But if you need some web application with customer portal to manage your customers for self-service VPS hosting take a look at OpenNebula, Proxmox, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack.

  2. How secure and isolated are containers?
    Ans: As secure as you will configure it to be. The security and isolation can be similar to managed container services from major cloud provider. If you want to take a look at container security check LXD Security

  3. Are they more secure than VMs?
    Ans: In general VMs will be more secure than cotainers given it is isolated at processor level not just in operating system. But based on security and network configuration VMs can be less secure than container. So again it will depend on how you do the production setup for VPS hosting.

3

A VPS is a VM, possibly based on KVM. Within a VM you can either install all services in there, either create nested VMs, or use LXD with system containers. Nested VMs tend to be overkill in terms of resources and LXD fills this void; you create system containers and further split a VPS into separate systems.

4

Thank you.