Why Hyper

The Best from Both Worlds: VM and Container

Performance

When VMs take tens of seconds to boot, Hyper is able to launch instances in sub-second. Also, Hyper requires the slimmed resource footprint: 28MB RAM, which means higher density: run hundreds of Hyper instances on a server, where a dozens of VMs would overload.

Secure

Hyper is immune from the "shared kernel" problem in container, because virtualization offers an excellent Hardware-enforced Isolation. The attack surface for a VM instance is quite small, as it lacks the variety of functions (and, therefore, the potential flaws to be exploited) provided by standard operating systems.

Portable

Hyper is hypervisor agnostic. The current implementation supports KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox (according to the platform), with more in the roadmap. Combined with the portability of App Container Image, Hyper allows you to build, ship, run app anywhere, without worrying the infrastructure technology stack.

Immutable

Hyper eliminates the need of Guest OS. There is no moving parts inside of a Hyper instance to be configured or managed. The entire stack is Immutable.

BYOK - bring your own kernel

In a multi-tenant environment, the platform must allow developers to pick different kernel and modules. This is an easy job in Hyper, but very hard to do in containers, due to the fact of "sharing the host's kernel".

Production Ready

Virtualization is mature. Features like LiveMigration, SDN, SDS have been battle-tested for years. With Hyper, you can just Plug & Play. No need to wait another two years for the container-version SDN.

Better ROI

Virtualization is widely implemented among enterprises. Instead of rebuilding everything with containers, Hyper provides a Seamless Migration path to your existing virtual infrastructure.

Summary

The following table gives a more detailed comparision between Container, (traditional) VM and Hyper:

-	Container	VM	Hyper
Isolation	Weak, shared kernel	Strong, HW-enforced	Strong, HW-enforced
Portable	Yes	No, hypervisor dependent	Yes, hypervisor agnostic and portable image
Boot	Fast, sub-second	Slow, tens of seconds	Fast, sub-second
Performance	Great	OK	Good, minimal resource footprint and overhead
Immutable	Yes	No, configuration management required	Yes, guest os is gone
Image Size	Small, MBs	Big, GBs	Small, MBs
Backward Compatibility	No, brand new world	Great, everything still works	Good, still a "Machine", much less changes
Maturity	No	Yes, production ready, SDN, SDS, LiveMigration, etc.	Yes, just plug-&-play
ROI	Low, rebuild everything with container	N/A	High, seamless integration with your virtual infrastructure

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