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 a shared environment, CPU, memory and network resources used by each container should be controlled to avoid the noisy neighbor problem. Docker provides configuration options for setting up minimum and maximum limits on CPU, memory and CPU while creating containers. Microsoft provides telemetry solutions at application level and also at the host level. These can capture critical information on the container performance and the host performance. At present these technologies only support Linux-based container hosts.

Dockerfile contents are operated from top to bottom. In order to reduce the build time of an image one should club statements. Docker checks for cached layers for every instruction in the Dockerfile. To increase the re-usability or caching installations not specific to an application, they should be separated out. Ordering of the instructions is also important since any change in the intermediate layer invalidates the remaining cached layers, and Docker starts building...