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

Insights and telemetry


When you run a multitude of systems on a virtualized environment, it is necessary to have a complete telemetry and monitoring solution which can be used to analyze how the containers are performing over time. In this section, we will learn about application and environment monitoring solutions which should be incorporated into every service for deeper insights into the application's performance and overall health of the system. Though most of these technologies are introduced by Microsoft, they do not yet support the Windows Container Ecosystem but it is worth understanding capabilities of each of the following systems so that you can plan to integrate it into your application topology when Microsoft announces support.

Application Insights

Visual Studio Application Insights for Docker helps you monitor containerized applications by collecting telemetry about performance of the application and the Docker host as well. Application insights capture all the activities performed...