This is key to why Docker containers are so efficient. Here you can see how each application does not get its own operating system. Now for comparison, here is the same stack containerized by Docker. In this graphic, note how each stack has its own Guest OS. If you’ve never used either these, I recommend you give them a try.

I personally use VMWare Fusion to run Windows on my MBP (and I still feel a little dirty every time I do). A popular solution you can try is Oracle’s Virtual Box which allows you to run a variety of operating systems on your personal machine. Here is the bloated architecture of a traditional virtual machine environment. To help you visualize the difference, here are a couple of images provided by Docker. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon are all big advocates of containers. This is why massive cloud computing companies running 10’s of thousands of servers are running containers. You get more bang for your buck running a bare metal machine with a bunch of containers that you do running a bare metal machine with a bunch of VMs. Because of this, containers are more resource efficient than full-blown virtual machines. Thus your application works like it is in its own self contained environment, but it’s actually sharing operating system resources of the host computer. It’s literally a ‘container’ inside the host OS. A container is a virtual walled environment for your application. Many view containers as virtual machines.

One of the more popular container solutions is Docker. Containers based deployments are rapidly gaining popularity in the enterprise.

Running kafka in docker on mac