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

Persistent Redis containers


By default, Redis Server saves snapshots of the data on disk using a binary file called dump.rdb as configured in the default configuration file. The Redis containers we've created so far are not persistent. For example, if the container is removed or stopped all the data saved by the container is lost. Sometimes we would want to have a copy of the database even after the container exits. Redis provides an option to alter the offline database file location (and name) so that we can backup/archive the latest database before the container exits. This provides a very good disaster recovery mechanism because all we need to backup is a single compact file which can be easily transferred and restored in a different location. In the previous chapter, we have learnt to use the host's storage to build scalable storage spaces called volumes which can be managed outside the running container from the host's filesystem. The following steps show how to use volumes to create...