Where to run containers? Bare metal vs virtual machines We look at the key differences between running containers in virtualised environments and on bare metal servers and focus in on the main trade-offs and decision points Share this item with your network: By Published: 25 May 2021 Containers are a serious and emerging contender as a method of application delivery. Although they are by no means in use universally yet, most enterprises have deployed containers somewhere or are investigating their capabilities. Their advantages centre on the ability to abstract everything needed to run applications away from the hardware, and with the potential for many – very many, in fact – container instances to be created and run on demand, they are supremely scalable.