# How do I plan/choose between #VM and #Container?

**URL:** <https://community.cloudbank.org/t/how-do-i-plan-choose-between-vm-and-container/32>\
**Category:** General Cloud\
**Created:** [August 18, 2020, 5:08pm UTC](https://community.cloudbank.org/t/how-do-i-plan-choose-between-vm-and-container/32 "2020-08-18T17:08:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rob](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/community.cloudbank.org/rob/32/5_2.png) [@rob](https://community.cloudbank.org/u/rob)\
**Post date:** [August 18, 2020, 5:08pm UTC](https://community.cloudbank.org/t/how-do-i-plan-choose-between-vm-and-container/32/1 "2020-08-18T17:08:44Z")

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I understand that a Virtual Machine (#VM) is sort of a dedicated (although virtual) computer that runs a full-blown operating system.

I further understand that a #Container is also a virtualized environment but it “lives in a pod” running in a conceptually “larger” virtual machine; so it is borrowing from that larger machine’s operating system rather than having its own operating system.

What is missing from my understanding is the practicality: At what point do I choose to use Containers over VMs? How do I develop a sense of what they are particularly good for? Obviously they share the common character of “place to run computations” but what makes one preferable to the other?

For context: I do not want to build any tricky cyberinfrastructure like a Jupyter Hub; I just want to run a set of programs rather asynchronously, working with a modest dataset of a few tens of Terabytes.