Previously I’ve blogged about what Containers and some a little bit abou the container ecosystem –> http://msandbu.org/what-is-containers-and-container-ecosystem/ Now lately I’ve been involved in being able to deliver Windows Containers and there lack of container orchestration tools (as of now) Now Windows Container came in Windows Server 2016 & Windows 10 and it is still pretty new. So why? There are plenty of enterprise applications which run for instance .Net based applications or web services and could be converted to a docker container and the same goes for database instances and other smaller services as well so make it easier to scale and deploy.
But linux containers has been here a while already, and of course in the container lifecycle management space there are alot of different vendors in this space. So what does a Container solution deliver in terms of features?
- 1: Universal Management Plane (Across multiple docker hosts)
- 2: Common registry
- 3: An orchestration solution (Swarm, Kubernetes, Marathon)
- 4: Source code management and integration
5: Monitoring / Loggings
6: Persistent Storage configuration
7: Service Discovery
8: Deployment and management of Network
9: Deployment private / public / host
The list is long but this are most of the required features for being able to deliver a CaaS solution. Now for Linux Containers there are alot of tools that we can use (Mesosphere, Kubernetes, Rancher, Openshift, Docker Datacenter) but of course the majority of platforms are running like this, Netflix for instance.
Now as of now Windows Containers are lacking this managmenet platform, as of now we cannot even use Swarm with Windows Containers (ref: https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/27612#issuecomment-255457426) another limitation to our Windows implementation of container networking is lack of support for service discovery, since they also cannot use any type of overlay network for multi-host nodes as well such as what Kubernetes and Openshift are using with VXLAN which is also another limitation.
But as of now Microsoft is doing rapid deployment to their public Docker Images https://hub.docker.com/u/microsoft/
Now I’ve been so fortunate to hear that Docker Datacenter is soon coming with Docker Datacenter for Windows (Beta) you can sign up for the beta here –> https://goto.docker.com/MicrosoftWindowsServers2016_LP.html
Also that Rancher will be supporting Windows Server 2016 Containers as well –> https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/4576 in an upcoming build.