"Pod" is a concept originated from Google. According to Google Kuberenetes:
In Kubernetes, rather than individual application containers, Pods are the smallest deployable units that can be created, scheduled, and managed.
A Pod (as in a pod of whales or pea pod) corresponds to a colocated group of applications running with a shared context. Within that context, the applications may also have individual cgroup isolations applied. A Pod models an application-specific "logical host" in a containerized environment. It may contain one or more applications which are relatively tightly coupled -- in a pre-container world, they would have executed on the same physical or virtual host.
The key idea behind Pod is that in a microservice architecture usually involves some "helper" programs, such as log, monitoring, cron, etc. These helper programs are built to work cooperatively with the app. Therefore, instead of running in multiple isolated containers, these processes should share the namespace, though they are packaged in different images.
In Hyper, a pod consists of a colocated group of Docker images, deployed in a single HyperVM instance. Inside of the instance, multiple applications from different images share the namespaces: PID, Network, IPC, UTS, User. Pod provides a familiar view of a tranditional OS to applications, rather than the philosophy of "one process per container":
- Processes can see each other
- Processes can use all IPC facilities to communicate
- Processes share the same hostname
- Processes have access to all NICs attached to the instance, and share the same port range
- Processes have access to all disk attached to the instance
The exception is Mount. Since a Pod may have multiple app images, Hyper applies the Mount namespace to isolate the root filesystem from each other.
Note: Hyper is immune from Pid 1 problem, since HyperStart launches the app processes and continues to live in the same namespace with them.