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

Preparing the development environment


In order to start creating Windows Containers, you need an instance of Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Enterprise/Professional edition (with Anniversary update). Irrespective of the environment, the PowerShell/Docker commands described in this chapter for creating and packaging containers/images are the same. If you already have the environment configured, you can directly skip to the Windows Server Containers development section. The following are the options we have for setting up a Windows Server Container development environment:

  • Windows 10: Using Windows 10 Enterprise or Professional edition with Anniversary update you can create Hyper-V Containers by enabling the containers role. Docker or PowerShell can be used to manage the containers. We will learn how to configure the Windows 10 environment in the following section.

Note

Windows 10 only supports Hyper-V Containers created using nanoserver base OS image; it does not support Windows Server Containers...