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


We covered the following topics in this chapter:

  • ASP.NET Core is a new version of the ASP.NET web application platform which is flexible, lean, open-sourced and cross-platform
  • ASP.NET Core can be hosted using IIS, Kestrel or any HTTP Server
  • The Windows Server Container development environment can only be set up on Windows Server 2016 because traditionally desktop OSes like Windows 10 do not support Windows Server Containers
  • ASP.NET 4.5 applications can also be configured and run inside Windows Server Containers using IIS
  • The container host's ports cannot be shared across multiple containers
  • Visual Studio's ASP.NET Core template provides extensibility features for developers to plug in custom build and publish options which we can use to clean, build, and run Docker/Windows Container images
  • All the containers created inside the container host are created using a virtual network called nat, and each container has an adapter which is connected to a virtual switch, over which inbound and outbound...