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Isn't this statement incorrect? "Isolates are far more lightweight than containers ... Containers effectively run a virtual machine, and there’s a lot of overhead associated with them"

Everything I have read suggests containers (being based on CGroups) add virtually no overhead at all (in the vicinity of 1% at worse from memory).

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Containers are very lightweight compared to a vm, but each FAAS container is required to run its own instance of v8. This implies some start up time (tens of ms?) and some memory use (10's of mb?).

My understanding of isolates is they are more or less a container, but at the v8 level instead of OS. This makes spinning up a function more akin to opening a new tab vs opening a new browser instance.

Thanks for the explanation. I get that this approach is faster than containers, but was mainly nitpicking over the statement that containers ARE VMs.

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