Book Image

Docker on Windows

By : Elton Stoneman
Book Image

Docker on Windows

By: Elton Stoneman

Overview of this book

Docker is a platform for running server applications in lightweight units called containers. You can run Docker on Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10, and run your existing apps in containers to get significant improvements in efficiency, security, and portability. This book teaches you all you need to know about Docker on Windows, from 101 to deploying highly-available workloads in production. This book takes you on a Docker journey, starting with the key concepts and simple examples of how to run .NET Framework and .NET Core apps in Windows Docker containers. Then it moves on to more complex examples—using Docker to modernize the architecture and development of traditional ASP.NET and SQL Server apps. The examples show you how to break up monoliths into distributed apps and deploy them to a clustered environment in the cloud, using the exact same artifacts you use to run them locally. To help you move confidently to production, it then explains Docker security, and the management and support options. The book finishes with guidance on getting started with Docker in your own projects, together with some real-world case studies for Docker implementations, from small-scale on-premises apps to very large-scale apps running on Azure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Securing applications with secure Docker images


I've covered many aspects of securing containers at runtime, but the Docker platform provides security in depth that starts before any containers are run. You start securing your application by securing the image that packages your application.

Building minimal images

It's unlikely that an attacker can compromise your application and gain access to the container, but you should build your image to mitigate the damage if that happened. Building a minimal image is key. The ideal Docker image should contain nothing more than the application and the dependencies it needs to run.

This is more difficult to achieve for Windows applications than Linux apps. A Docker image for a Linux app can use a minimal distribution as the base, packaging just the application binaries on top. The attack surface for that image is very small even if an attacker gained access to the container, they would find themselves in an operating system with very few features.

In...