Containers is the next breakthrough in building modern and cloud based applications, comparing it with its predecessors like VM virtualization one would realize that containerization is the fastest, most resource-efficient, scalable, and secure way of building application hosting environments we know so far. Learning Windows Server Containers take you through a long and profound journey of building containerized ASP.NET applications on latest windows server platforms using Docker command line and Docker REST API. The book shows you how to build and ship containers from one environment to other with less hassle during the continuous integration and delivery process. You will learn to build containerized applications using scalable storage containers, cache containers with isolation levels like in VMs. The book helps you build an ecosystem of container hosts, manage composite container deployments, and resource governance.
Chapter 1, Exploring Virtualization, teaches you different virtualization levels, challenges with each type of virtualization, containers as a virtualization platform, and benefits of running containerized applications, tooling support, other container platforms available in market today.
Chapter 2, Deploying First Container, teaches you to set up development environment, understand the Docker terminology, installing images from Docker Hub, create custom windows container images using Docker CLI and authoring Dockerfile.
Chapter 3, Working with Container Images, will introduce you to common container management tasks such as listing the containers, start/stop, cleaning up unused containers or images using Docker CLI on Windows Server environment.
Chapter 4, Developing Container Applications, teaches you to create and deploy ASP.NET Core Web applications using Visual Studio 2015, .NET Core, and C# to Windows Server 2016 Core as Windows Container using PowerShell and Docker CLI.
Chapter 5, Deploying Container Applications, teaches you to create Windows Server Container environment on Azure using Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure PowerShell, configure remote management for container hosts, deploy container applications remotely as Windows Containers and Hyper-V containers, configuring software load balancer and so on.
Chapter 6, Storage Volumes, talks about building file based storage based containers using Docker volumes and relational database containers using Microsoft SQL Server.
Chapter 7, Redis Cache Containers, teaches you to create persistent Redis Cache containers using Redis and storage volumes.
Chapter 8, Container Network, introduces you to Windows Container networks, different networking modes, building custom container networks using different networking modes and deploying containers on custom networks.
Chapter 9, Continuous Integration and Delivery, teaches you to build continuous integration and deployment pipelines for container applications using Visual Studio Team Services (TFS Online) on Azure, Docker Hub, and Git. You will learn to create a create a custom build server for building, packaging and releasing containers to windows container hosts.
Chapter 10, Manage Resource Allocation and REST API, teaches you to manage container resource utilization, create and manage containers using Docker REST API via Postman and C#, image optimization strategies and monitoring options available for containers and container hosts.
Chapter 11, Composite Containers and Clustering, teaches you to orchestrate multiple container deployments using Docker Compose, set up scaling for multicontainer environments and authoring Docker Compose service definition. Also, you will learn the concepts of cluster management using Docker Swarm and Azure Container Service.
Chapter 12, Nano Server, serves as an introduction to Windows Nano Server, building custom Nano Server images using PowerShell, deploying containers on Nano Server, working with Nano containers, and configuring Nano Server using PowerShell DSC.
This book assumes basic knowledge of PowerShell, C#, .NET, ASP.NET 5, cloud computing, and Azure. The book will help your setup development environment on desktop operating system like Windows 10 (with Anniversary update) and deploying container applications on VMs running on-premise and on Azure. To practice building containerized applications on an on-premise environment like Windows 10, the host machine should have Hyper-V feature enabled. The book shows building virtual environments using Windows 10 built-in feature called Hyper-V but you can try any other desktop virtualization software like VMware or virtual box. The book also uses Visual Studio 2015 for application development, if you have hands-on experience working with Visual Studio 2015 it will easy to execute the samples. Following is the basic hardware configuration for running Hyper-V and Visual Studio 2015:
- CPU: 1.6 GHz or faster processor, 4 cores
- 64-bit processor with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) – (for Hyper-V only)
- CPU support for VM Monitor Mode Extension (VT-c on Intel CPU's) – (for Hyper-V only)
- Minimum of 8 GB RAM
- Disk space: 80 GB
Apart from the these, you will also need an Azure subscription for creating container environments on Azure. Microsoft offers a free subscription which can be used for 30 days in-case you do not have a paid subscription. The software requirements for the book are as follows:
- Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition or above)
- Windows 10 with Anniversary update
- SQL Server Management Studio
- Redis Desktop Manager
- Postman
Internet connectivity is required to install any packages for application development, download images (ISO files) for windows server 2016 or source code from GitHub repository.
The primary target audience for this book would be developers who would like to use Windows Server Containers to build portable apps that can run anywhere (laptop, server, and public or private cloud) without little or no changes to the code. Developers will be able to build and ship high-quality applications. As Windows Containers has a broad impact on developers and administrators alike, this book will also help IT professionals or DevOps Engineers prepare infrastructure which is easy to use and maintain. IT professionals will be able to optimize resource utilization by increasing the density of applications per machine. The concepts discussed in this book also help DevOps develop a container mindset, establish practices around publishing developed code as containers from development environment to production easily.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The remove() method finds the first instance of the element (passed an argument) and removes it from the list."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
docker search microsoftNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on Test Connection and ensure the connection is successful."
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