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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure a "A process with cgroups and namespaces" makes things much clearer though somebody with understanding of those might infer certain properties.

"a kind of lightweight VM" seems a much more intuitive answer, with limitations.

The link is useful tho, she's a good writer.

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Not OP but I also interview. I see CGroups and namespaces is a follow up to “how does it work or how is it usually isolated?” And I ask “why would I use it?” Or “when would I choose containers over vm?” Or vice versa to get to actual architectural decisions

The wrong answer usually involves a lot of hemming and hawing

Yeah tbf it was offered as a follow on question, I'm just not sure it makes things clearer in describing functional and design differences.

But they're trying to figure out if the person they're interviewing has the level of knowledge necessary to understand what a process sandboxed from other processes in its own cgroup and namespaces means, not trying to give an intuitive description to someone who doesn't understand how Linux works.

Except "a kind of lightweight VM" is an incorrect answer. I'm trying to gauge if the person knows what they're talking about because running Docker and Kubernetes in production is hard. I don't want someone thinking they can go into some vsphere console to reboot their VMs when a pod is having problems.

Except "a kind of lightweight VM" is an incorrect answer

It's a pretty reasonable starting point as a description compared to the meaningless rejoinder which says nothing about what the point of them is.

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