The concepts of containers and OS-level virtualization have their roots in the chroot system call in Unix V7 operating systems (OSes), which date back to the late 1970s. Starting with a simple concept of process isolation and chroot jails, where the process is running in an apparently isolated root directory, containerization has undergone rapid evolution and became a mainstream technology in the 2010s with the advent of Linux Containers (LXC) and Docker. In 2014, Microsoft announced support for Docker Engine in the incoming release of Windows Server 2016. This is where the story of Windows containers and Kubernetes on Windows begins.
In this chapter, we will provide you with a better understanding of containers for the Windows OS by highlighting important differences between containerization on Linux and Windows and container runtime types on Windows, namely...