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

Configuring load balancer


Running a single instance of an application does not guarantee availability. To maximize availability and provide best performance to our users we should be able to easily scale our applications. In this section, we will use an NGINX server to configure load balancing among multiple Music Store containers:

  1. On the Azure Portal, click on the IP address to assign a custom DNS name to the remote host. We will use this DNS name to configure load balancer endpoints.
  1. Click on Configuration on the Public IP address section.
  2. Assign your favorite name in the DNS name label (optional) section and click on Save as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. Let us create a new NGINX Windows Container image from the development environment and publish it to Docker Hub. The resources for creating NGINX images are available under chapter5/resources/musicstore-nginx-azure. There are two files that we will be using here: Dockerfile contains the instructions to install NGINX on a windows server...