You can follow along with the code samples from this book using the GitHub repository https://github.com/sixeyed/docker-on-windows/tree/second-edition/ch01. You'll learn how to install Docker in this chapter - the only pre-requisite is Windows 10 with the 1809 Microsoft update, or Windows Server 2019.

Docker was originally developed on Linux, taking advantage of core Linux features, but making it simple and efficient to use containers for application workloads. Microsoft saw the potential and worked closely with the Docker engineering team to bring the same functionality to Windows.

Windows Server 2016 was the first version of Windows built to run Docker containers; Windows Server 2019 continues the innovation with significantly improved features and performance for Windows containers. You can run the same Docker containers on Windows 10 for development and testing that you run on Windows Server in production. Right now, you can only run Windows applications in containers on Windows, but Microsoft is adding support for Linux application containers to run on Windows too.

The first thing you need to know is that there is no integration between containers...

Docker is a very powerful but very simple application platform. You can get started with running your existing apps in Docker in just a few days, and be ready to move to production in another few days. This book will take you through lots of examples of .NET Framework and .NET Core applications running in Docker. You'll learn how to build, ship, and run applications in Docker and move on to advanced topics such as solution design, security, administration, instrumentation, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

To start with, you need to understand the core Docker concepts: images, registries, containers, and orchestrators – and understand how Docker actually runs.

It's easy to install Docker on Windows 10, using Docker Desktop – a Windows package that sets up all the prerequisites, deploys the latest version of the Docker Community Engine, and gives you a UI with some useful options to manage image repositories and remote clusters.

In production, you should ideally use Windows Server 2019 Core, the installation with no UI. This reduces the attack surface and the amount of Windows updates your server will need. If you move all your apps to Docker, you won't need any other Windows features installed; you'll just have Docker Engine running as a Windows service.

I'll walk through both of these installation options and show you a third option using a VM in Azure, which is useful if you want to try Docker but don't have access to Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019.

Every code listing in this book is accompanied by a full code sample on my GitHub repository at https://github.com/sixeyed/docker-on-windows. There's a branch for this edition of the book, called second-edition. The source tree is organized into a folder for each chapter, and for each chapter there's a folder for each code sample. In this chapter, I've used three samples to create Docker images, which you'll find in ch01\ch01-whale, ch01\ch01-az, and ch01\ch01-dockertls.

I prefer to follow along with code samples when I'm learning a new technology, but if you want to use working versions of the demo applications, every sample is also available as a public Docker image on Docker Hub. Wherever you see a docker...

In this chapter I introduced Docker, an application platform which can run new and old apps in lightweight units of compute called containers. Companies are moving to Docker for efficiency, security, and portability. I covered the following topics:

• How Docker works on Windows and how containers are licensed.
• The key Docker concepts: images, registries, containers, and orchestrators.
• The options to run Docker on Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, or Azure.

If you're planning to work along with the code samples in the rest of the book, you should have a working Docker environment by now. In Chapter 2, Packaging and Running Applications as Docker Containers, I'll move onto packaging more complex apps as Docker images and show how to manage states in containers with Docker volumes.