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

Summary


Nano Server is the new headless deployment option which comes with Windows Server 2016. Nano Server is a deeply refactored version designed to provide lightest, fastest ever configuration with lesser patches, reboots, better resource utilization and tighter security. Nano Server does not have any GUI component, the only way to manage Nano Server is by using Windows Remote Management. Nano Server has 93% lesser VHD Size, 92% fewer critical security advisories and 80% fewer reboots than the Windows Server. Nano Server can be provisioned on Azure or on-premise environment by using the Nano Server installation ISO, VHD options. Roles and features live outside Nano Server, so they should be downloaded from Internet or copied to the Nano Server. Microsoft has also release a custom image builder for Nano Server. Nano server comes with online package repository which allows us to connect to any online repository, install and download roles and features that are available. Microsoft also...