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

Dangling images


Docker creates few images with no name and version called dangling images, these images can be observed while using the command docker images -a as shown in the following screenshot:

To understand more about dangling images, let us understand first how Windows operating systems store downloaded container images. By default, the images are stored at the Docker root directory which is C:\ProgramData\docker (ProgramData is a hidden folder). To find out what the Docker root is on your machine you can run the following command:

As we know Docker on Windows follows a layered storage system, and each layer is connected via a parent-child relationship with another layer. When we try to pull an image from the hub, Docker pulls one layer at a time and stores the intermediate layers at the Docker root directory. These intermediate layers are named as <none>:<none> these are good unnamed images. You can see the list of intermediate images and corresponding Identifier information...