Preface

The world is changing. When my wife and I had our first child, I remember numerous people telling us all about how quickly life would fly past now. This is one of those things that everyone hears, but nobody believes until they suddenly realize it has been 5…10…20 years and suddenly we're looking back wondering, "Where did it go?"

So it is with technology. Computers are ever-changing, ever-improving. My first computer at my first IT job was running Windows 98. Some of you reading this have likely never heard of Windows 98, because you weren't born yet. Ouch.

Entering the technology workforce today is very different than it was back then. Nowadays you're often expected to know everything there is to know about current on-premises infrastructures such as Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, switching and routing, and firewalls, and even have a pretty good bearing on security risks, prevention, and remediation. In addition to current systems, it is extremely helpful to know and have experience with previous versions of these technologies so that you aren't completely lost when you encounter one for the first time. Tack on to that all the quickly escalating cloud options provided by Azure, which seem to change daily, and I imagine it can all feel a bit overwhelming.

While marketing engines around the world are working hard to make everyone believe that on-premises resources are a thing of the past, it simply isn't true. Most businesses, and especially most enterprises, will continue to run on-premises servers, storage, and impressively complex networking for decades to come. What is it that drives the processing power of these physical datacenters for the majority of companies around the world? Windows Server. In fact, even if you have gone all-in for cloud adoption and host 100% of your serving resources in Azure, you are still making use of Windows Server 2019. It is the operating system that underpins Azure!

Over the last few years, we have all become familiar with software-defined computing, using virtualization technology to turn our server workloads into a software layer. Now, Microsoft is expanding on this idea with new terms such as software-defined networking, software-defined storage, and even an entire Software-Defined Data Center. The technologies that make these happen allow us to virtualize and share resources on a grand scale.

To make our workloads more flexible and cloud-ready, Microsoft is taking major steps in shrinking the server compute platform and creating new ways of interfacing with those servers. There is an underlying preference for new Windows Servers to be running the smaller, more efficient, and more secure Server Core interface. Additionally, application containers have made huge advancements over the past few years, and Server 2019 allows us to transition our applications into containers to run them in isolation from each other and on a mass scale. We also have new centralized management tools for administering our servers and networks, namely, the newly updated Windows Admin Center.

We'll take some time to discover together the inner workings of the newest version of this server operating system, which will drive and support so many of our business infrastructures over the coming years. Windows servers have dominated our datacenter rack spaces for more than two decades. Will this newest iteration in the form of Windows Server 2019 continue that trend?