What characteristic is true for containers?

Containers are designed to be small, fast, and portable, which is a primary characteristic that sets them apart from traditional virtual machines (VMs). They encapsulate an application and its dependencies in a lightweight package that shares the host operating system’s kernel, allowing for efficient utilization of system resources. This approach eliminates the overhead of a full guest operating system, enabling quicker startup times and improved performance. Given this design, containers can easily be deployed across different environments, making them ideal for microservices architecture and agile development practices.

The other options do not capture the essence of container technology as accurately. For instance, while it is true that containers can be used in production and non-production workloads, they are particularly advantageous and commonly used in production due to their efficiency and scalability. A 3-tier application structure refers to a specific architectural design and is not inherently a characteristic of containers; rather, containers can be used to implement various types of architectures. Lastly, while containers and public cloud VMs may share some similarities, especially in providing resources and environments for applications, they function fundamentally differently, as containers are designed to be lightweight and use fewer resources compared to full VMs.