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

A brief introduction to Nano Server


Modern data centers would need a highly-optimized server platforms to run distributed applications cloud based apps or containers based on MicroServices architecture. The existing server platforms are powerful yet bulky, have large surface area (more ports open and the VHD Size) and demand more reboots for patch updates. Sometimes you are forced to reboot the server for patch updates which are not used at all which impacts the application's up times. With Windows Server 2016 Microsoft has added another installation option called Nano Server which greatly reduces the server footprint and solves the ports and reboot problems, specially designed to run on private clouds and data centers. The Nano Server installation option is available for Standard and DataCenter editions of Windows Server 2016. Nano Servers are fast and powerful with remote administration capabilities at the same time they are meant for tailored applications.

Nano Server is the new headless...