The idea behind ephemeral hosts
As a Windows sysadmin, never in my life would I imagine having an ephemeral (i.e., “lasting for a very short time,” according to the Oxford dictionary) or temporary Windows host in a production environment; the use case just isn’t there. Usually, Windows Servers are used to host long-running applications, where the hosts become aged after 4 or 5 years, or even more. Thousands of patches are applied, troubleshooting and hardening occur, and these sometimes help achieve years of uptime without a single reboot. This technique has been working for many years, but there is no place for this type of strategy in a Windows container world.
In the container world, containers are immutable, and hosts are ephemeral. That means the host doesn’t carry an application dependency or installation; it is just the container runtime and some additional agents for security if needed. If the server goes down, there is no dependency associated...
