Think of both as ways to get a consistent baseline system which your configuration will be applied to. It&#x27;s faster to spin up a VM or container than it is to do a fresh install on bare metal so you can realistically test that you really could do a clean install from the documented starting point.<p>Containers add even faster startup time and the option of isolation so you can have multiple containers which think they&#x27;re writing to the same location but actually aren&#x27;t. That&#x27;s not terribly important in a one-app-per-system model but it&#x27;s awesome for testing or running multiple instances of an insufficiently-configurable app on the same system.