A typical way to take advantage of the nodes of a Big Data environment are containers. A container is an aggregation of different technologies that exist in the operating system and that allow an application to run, usually a single process, within an operating system. In general, the container is completely linked to the life cycle of its process: when the container is started, the container process begins, when the process ends, so does the container. The container comprises only the application and its dependencies. It runs as an isolated process in user space on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers. It therefore partly enjoys the resource isolation and resource allocation benefits of virtual machines, but is much more portable and efficient. Nonetheless, these technologies have the purpose of doing a high-level management of the underlying hardware.

Reference:

• D. Steenken, S. Voß, and R. Stahlbock, ‘Container terminal operation and operations research - a classification and literature review’, Spectr., vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 3–49, Jan. 2004.