Containers come to Windows with new Windows Server 2016 beta

The third technical preview of Windows Server 2016 has been rolled out by Microsoft to beta testers. A second technology that increases security by wrapping containers in Hyper-V virtual machines will also be available in Windows Server 2016, but we won’t get a look at that until a future preview. They work with Microsoft’s Windows Server Technical Previews, which are the precursors to Microsoft’s emerging Windows Server 2016 product. The end goal is to give developers and IT ops a single interface to deploy and manage applications in Docker containers across infrastructure that consists of both Linux and Windows servers. The two flavours are Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers.

Of course, while system-level virtualization has been a tremendous win in terms of letting organizations consolidate hardware usage, optimize management, and decrease operational costs, the reality is that isolating applications into their own, discrete, copies of an entire ecosystem (i.e., an operating system) comes with some overhead.

“To bring the power of containers to all developers, last October we announced plans to implement container technology in Windows Server”.

Microsoft Azure already added support for running Docker containers on Linux servers within the cloud platform.

Microsoft also published the release notes of Windows Server Technical Preview 3, which includes Windows Server Containers which are an isolated, resource-controlled, and portable operating environment. “Through this release, millions of Windows developers will be able to experience the benefits of containers for the first time using the languages of their choice – whether.NET, ASP.NET, and PowerShell or Python, Ruby on Rails, Java and many others”. See Microsoft, Docker Intensify Container Collaboration.

Microsoft has released the latest preview version of the upcoming Windows Server 2016. Universal Apps have to be built from scratch or ported from existing software and since launching the Universal Windows Platform with Windows 8 Microsoft has struggled to attract the most in-demand apps to the Windows Store. A Docker client that ran on Windows computers came out in April.

Preliminary support for building and deploying to containers in Azure is also now available for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online.

Today’s preview also includes updates to the Nano Server deployment mode, enabling Nano Server to be deployed on both a physical host and on a virtual machine.