Page 20 - MSDN Magazine, April 2017

CONTAINERS
Bringing Docker to Windows Developers with Windows Server
Containers
Taylor Brown
For the last couple of years Docker and containers have been one of the hottest topics in dev circles, and in enterprises, around the world. The release of Windows Server 2016 last fall added a lot to the conversation by opening containers to Windows developers. How did the world of Windows and Docker come together? It started during the gorgeous Puget Sound summer of 2014 as the Windows Base team embarked on a new project that would ultimately become Windows Server Containers. This is the story behind the code, and a glimpse into what it was like to build one of the top new features in Windows Server 2016.
History of Containers and the Root of Docker
In 2013, containers quickly started generating interest at the key- board of Solomon Hykes, who at the time was the CTO and founder of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) startup, DotCloud. Hykes took a set of relatively obscure and difficult-to-use Linux kernel features
and brought them together under an open source tool he called Docker. He wasn’t intentionally trying to become the king of con- tainers, but was looking for a solution to a problem that plagued DotCloud: How could developers provide code that worked the same way on their servers as it did in their working environment?
Hykes took a set of relatively obscure and difficult-to-use Linux kernel features and brought them together under an open source tool he called Docker.
A real problem for services like DotCloud stemmed from the extensive and diverse set of software applications customers wanted to deploy—software built with different development processes, different patch cycles and requirements, written in different lan- guages (both code and spoken), and with different dependencies. Hardware virtualization—virtual machines (VMs)—was the best tool available, but it presented challenges in shipping software from developer laptops to production. Either you had to use fully configured VMs from the developer, which made scalability and
This article discusses:
• History of containers and the root of Docker
• Windows Server Containers
• Hyper-V isolation
• How Docker and Windows Server Containers came together Technologies discussed:
Windows Server 2016, Docker, Linux
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