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

Benefits of running workloads on Nano Server


Let us look at some of the core challenges that Nano Server solves when compared to server core or the GUI version.

Live migrations

Managing a cluster of Windows Server Machines is a trivial task, when one is asked to migrate say 10-20 servers across geographical boundaries, then this is one hell of a task. Each Windows Server machine roughly takes around 4-5 GB of space with all the roles installed. Live Migrating 10-20 servers demands huge bandwidth, we are transferring almost 1 TB of data for just migrating 20 servers across the globe. Often to overcome this, server administrators deploy new set of servers in the new location and migrate the workloads instead, but this too involves cost overheads and downtimes to the application. Using Nano Server Live Migrations will be easy and fast because each server takes just about 400-500 MB of storage space.

Zero footprint

Nano Server comes with what is just needed, any server roles or optional features...