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Learning Windows Server Containers
Learning Windows Server Containers

Learning Windows Server Containers: Build and deploy high-quality portable apps faster

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Learning Windows Server Containers

Deploying First Container

Containerization helps you build software in layers, containers inspire distributed development, packaging, and publishing in the form of containers. Developers or IT administrators just have to choose a base OS image, create customized layers as per their requirements, and distribute using public or private repositories. Microsoft and Docker together have provided an amazing toolset that helps you build and deploy containers in no time. It is very easy to set up a dev/test environment as well. Microsoft Windows Server OS or Windows 10 Desktop OS comes with Plug and Play (PnP) features for running Windows Server Containers or Hyper-V Containers. Docker Hub, a public repository for images, serves as a huge catalog of customized images built by community or Docker enthusiasts. The images on Docker Hub are freely available for anyone to download, customize, and distribute.

In this chapter...

Preparing the development environment

In order to start creating Windows Containers, you need an instance of Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Enterprise/Professional edition (with Anniversary update). Irrespective of the environment, the PowerShell/Docker commands described in this chapter for creating and packaging containers/images are the same. If you already have the environment configured, you can directly skip to the Windows Server Containers development section. The following are the options we have for setting up a Windows Server Container development environment:

  • Windows 10: Using Windows 10 Enterprise or Professional edition with Anniversary update you can create Hyper-V Containers by enabling the containers role. Docker or PowerShell can be used to manage the containers. We will learn how to configure the Windows 10 environment in the following section.
Windows 10 only supports Hyper-V Containers...

Windows Server Containers development

If you have an environment ready for executing Windows Server Containers, you can start from here to learn how to create containers from existing images or create new images.

Pulling images from Docker Hub

In this section, we will use an existing Docker image to create a new container. Docker Hub is a public repository for storing Docker images. Docker images can be made up of Linux base OS or windowsservercore OS. Since OS kernels are completely different, containers made up of Linux cannot be installed on Windows and vice versa. At this point we cannot differentiate by looking at the name if the base OS is made up of Linux/Windows.
If you try to install or pull a Linux image on Windows, it might fail with an error as follows...

Running web application in Docker

Now let's start creating our first image using the Dockerfiles approach:

  1. Create a folder under C:\ on Windows Server Containers host machine for storing our image artifacts; let's call it learningwsc-chapter2.
  2. Create another folder within learning-chapter2/hellodocker, which will hold the artifacts for our first image.
  3. Open a text editor such as notepad and copy the following contents into the file:
       FROM microsoft/windowsservercore
MAINTAINER srikanth@live.com
LABEL Description="IIS" Vendor=Microsoft" Version="10?
RUN powershell -Command Add-WindowsFeature Web-Server
COPY index.htm /inetpub/wwwroot/
EXPOSE 80
CMD [ "ping localhost -t" ]
  1. Save this file as Dockerfile under learningwsc-chapter2/hellodocker.
  2. Make sure the file is saved without any extension.
To save a file without any extensions...

Summary

In this chapter, we have learnt how to create and configure Windows Server Container and Hyper-V environment on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016. Windows 10 professional or Enterprise with Anniversary update can be used to run Hyper-V Containers only.

Windows Server 2016 TP5 ISO can be downloaded and configured as VM using VirtualBox or Hyper-V Manager to run Windows Server Containers. We can also use a readily available template on Azure.

Windows Server 2016 has two installation options, Windows Server Core no GUI version and full GUI versions. Both the versions support windows and Hyper-V Containers. To host Hyper-V Containers, the hosting OS should support nested virtualization.

Every Windows Server Container is based off of a base OS image called windowsservercore.

Hyper-V Containers use a much smaller version of a base OS image called nanoserver.

Windows PowerShell or Docker commands can be used for...

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Key benefits

  • •Discover the secret to building highly portable apps that run on any machine with Windows Server 2016 anywhere, from laptops, desktop servers, and public or private clouds, without any changes to the code
  • •Build your company cost-effective, container-based apps that support large-scale, virtual cloud environments
  • •The most up-to-date help on the market, offering developers expert guidance in building and shipping high-quality apps, and also helping admins create infrastructure that's simple to maintain

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for application developers with a basic programming knowledge of C#, ASP.NET, and PowerShell. IT Administrators or DevOps engineers with basic PowerShell experience can benefit by extending their learning to use PowerShell to manage containers on Windows environments and use additional management tools.

What you will learn

  • • Build and deploy ASP.NET web applications as Windows Containers on Windows 10 (Desktop) and Azure using Visual Studio 2015, Docker, and PowerShell
  • • Build and manage custom images using Windows Server Core base OS image and Docker CLI, publish images to Docker, tag images, author Docker files, and so on
  • • Create enterprise-scale, production-grade container environments using Redis Cache containers and SQL Server containers with storage volumes, set up custom container networks, continuous integration, and deployment pipelines using VSTS, Azure, and Git
  • • Deploy a composite container environment using Docker Compose on Windows
  • • Learn to build applications using Microsoft's thinnest server platform - Nano Servers. Build custom Nano Server images and Nano Containers using Windows PowerShell and configure using PowerShell Core, DSC

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Apr 28, 2017
Length: 404 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785887932
Vendor :
Microsoft
Languages :

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Product Details

Publication date : Apr 28, 2017
Length: 404 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785887932
Vendor :
Microsoft
Languages :

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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
Exploring Virtualization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying First Container Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Working with Container Images Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Developing Container Applications Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying Container Applications Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Storage Volumes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Redis Cache Containers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Container Network Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Continuous Integration and Delivery Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Manage Resource Allocation and REST API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Composite Containers and Clustering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Nano Server Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
(2 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 50%
Rohit Sep 25, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book helped me get a jump start on containers on Windows. The samples were very easy and helpful to get me started. However, as the Docker versions have changed, I had to review the latest changes on the Docker site. However the concepts were explained very well supported by the samples, which I could use and try it myself. Strongly recommend for anyone to learn containers on Windows platform.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Andrei Tudor Sep 06, 2017
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
What can I say! Most of examples or samples don't work or look messy.I think the author learned Windows Containers while working on this book!It's a shame, especially from price tag perspective!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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