Book Image

Learning Windows Server Containers

Book Image

Learning Windows Server Containers

Overview of this book

Windows Server Containers are independent, isolated, manageable and portable application environments which are light weight and shippable. Decomposing your application into smaller manageable components or MicroServices helps in building scalable and distributed application environments. Windows Server Containers have a significant impact on application developers, development operations (DevOps) and infrastructure management teams. Applications can be built, shipped and deployed in a fast-paced manner on an easily manageable and updatable environment. Learning Windows Server Containers teaches you to build simple to advanced production grade container based application using Asp.Net Core, Visual Studio, Azure, Docker and PowerShell technologies. The book teaches you to build and deploy simple web applications as Windows and Hyper-V containers on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 on Azure. You will learn to build on top of Windows Container Base OS Images, integrate with existing images from Docker Hub, create custom images and publish to Hub. You will also learn to work with storage containers built using Volumes and SQL Server as container, create and configure custom networks, integrate with Redis Cache containers, configure continuous integration and deployment pipelines using VSTS and Git Repository. Further you can also learn to manage resources for a container, setting up monitoring and diagnostics, deploy composite container environments using Docker Compose on Windows and manage container clusters using Docker Swarm. The last chapter of the book focuses on building applications using Microsoft’s new and thinnest server platform – Nano Servers.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


In this chapter we covered the following points:

  • VMs help create isolated environments, each with guest OS. Software applications or services can run inside a VM with complete isolation from another VM.
  • Hypervisors can run discrete VMs such as Linux and Windows together.
  • VMs suffer from portability and packaging due to the huge size and intense orchestration needs.
  • Containerization helps run software systems as isolated processes inside a machine. Containers increase the density of applications per machine, and also provide application packaging and shipping capabilities.
  • Windows Server 2016 supports containerization using kernel features such as filesystems, namespaces, and registry.
  • Windows Server 2016 runs two types of containers, Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers. Windows Server Containers share OS kernels, whereas Hyper-V Containers run their own OS.
  • Nano Server is a deeply refactored version of Windows Server, which is 93% smaller, remotely-administered, and ideal for microservices.
  • Microsoft Azure supports cluster management solutions such as DC/OS and swarm.