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

Setting up the development environment


Typically, developers work on traditional desktop OSes like Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10. Though these OSes are still suitable to develop ASP.NET Core web applications or services, developing or debugging Windows Server Containers is not supported at this time. This is because Windows 10 OS with Anniversary update only runs Hyper-V Containers using nanoserver as a base OS image. In this chapter, we will be setting up the development environment on Windows Server 2016 for developing ASP.NET Core applications.

The following tools are necessary for developing ASP.NET Core applications:

  • Visual Studio 2015 Community or Enterprise: Visual Studio 2015 Community is a full-featured, freely available IDE for developing modern web and mobile applications or services. Visual Studio 2015 Community can be downloaded from here, https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/.
  • .NET Core VS 2015 Tooling Preview: This extension provides necessary runtimes, SDK, and...