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


In this chapter, we have learnt how to create and configure Windows Server Container and Hyper-V environment on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016. Windows 10 professional or Enterprise with Anniversary update can be used to run Hyper-V Containers only.

Windows Server 2016 TP5 ISO can be downloaded and configured as VM using VirtualBox or Hyper-V Manager to run Windows Server Containers. We can also use a readily available template on Azure.

Windows Server 2016 has two installation options, Windows Server Core no GUI version and full GUI versions. Both the versions support windows and Hyper-V Containers. To host Hyper-V Containers, the hosting OS should support nested virtualization.

Every Windows Server Container is based off of a base OS image called windowsservercore.

Hyper-V Containers use a much smaller version of a base OS image called nanoserver.

Windows PowerShell or Docker commands can be used for searching and downloading images from Docker Hub and also creating and managing...