Learning Windows Server Containers: Build and deploy high-quality portable apps faster

Title Page

Learning Windows Server Containers

Build and deploy high-quality portable apps faster

Srikanth Machiraju

    BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright

Learning Windows Server Containers

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: April 2017

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Credits

Foreword

Containers have become an elegant way to virtualize system level services in the recent past. Coupled with microservices which provide well-bounded, self-contained, application services, containers bring a revolutionary shift to the way solutions are built and deployed on computer infrastructure. Docker has been a favorite way to build containers and container clusters on open source. The ability to pack hundreds or even thousands of these containers into a physical machine provides a great way to deploy services in an optimal and scalable fashion. The ability to use different operating systems in each of the containers (such as, Linux, Windows) along with any needed functionality packed together is a convenience that contributes to building modular systems. Microsoft Windows and Azure cloud platforms have matured over time and plays a critical role in building systems addressing the needs of digital transformation currently underway in enterprise IT systems across the world. Whether it is the enterprise application that handles millions (or billions) of mobile users or one that handles zillions of IoT sensors (connected cars, refrigerators, or whatever you have), it can now be built using Windows as a platform using the containers model and hosted on Azure cloud to provide the necessary scale.

Deployment and frequent releases is another area which has been revolutionized by container technology. DevOps, the practice that bring together development, deployment, and operations into a seamless continuum by making infrastructure as code a reality, is a part of the agile way of building solutions today. By using the concept of containers, enterprise IT teams can effortlessly and efficiently deploy solutions to immutable infrastructure.

This book deals with all the above aspects and is a timely addition to the windows and Azure developer's toolkit to understand windows containers and their usage in building different types of systems. The integration of DevOps into the subject brings a well thought out addition that helps in implementing cutting edge application development practices.

The author is a well-seasoned developer and architect, who has significant experience building modern enterprise solutions for large customers and his practical approach in dealing with this complex subject shines through in every page of this book. Bringing his consulting background and enormous technical prowess to the task, he has detailed out approach to application development with windows containers which will help developers, architects and operation teams in building modern cloud based enterprise scale applications.

Starting with an introduction to containers and microservices, the author takes a developer on a profound journey that covers from building a simple Hello World container to advanced practical usage, such as building complex enterprise applications using SQL Server, Redis Cache, storage volumes, VSTS for continuous build and deployment, resource management, and insights.

Ritesh Modi

Senior Technology Evangelist

Microsoft India

About the Author

Srikanth Machiraju is an ardent techie, DevOps practitioner, and developer consultant on Microsoft Azure and .NET technologies. He works for Microsoft Global Services, Modern Apps team, Hyderabad India. Over the past 9 years he has worked as a lead consultant for design and development of cloud-based application, migrating legacy applications to cloud, corporate trainer on Azure technologies, and speaker at various user group meetings on Microsoft Technologies. He loves to teach and evangelize best practices and patterns in application development. He continues to explore building modern, smart, and cloud-born applications with more reachability and integration using Azure, IoT devices, Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, parallelism, and enterprise level security. When away from work he loves to cook for his family, explore and review new food joints, watch movies, swim, and play Xbox.

He is also working on another artwork called Developing Bots using Microsoft Bot Framework which is due for release by end of 2017. The book focuses on building smart and intelligent bots using Microsoft Bot framework and Azure Cognitive Services.

I would like to thank my family, specially my wife Sonia Madan for being unconditionally supportive throughout the journey of this book. I would also like to thank my mentors Vineet Bhatia and Phani Tipparaju from BrainScale for their guidance throughout my career without learning from them this achievement would not have been possible. It is the people above and many more I may not have listed here inspired me learn, achieve, and feel obligated to pass the knowledge and learnings to the willing.

About the Reviewer

Romeo Mlinar has been working as Microsoft Senior System Engineer. Professionally connected with computer technology for more than a decade. Passionately devoted with Microsoft products and technology, for instance, system center, planning and design of Active Directory, as well as Windows Server services, devoting special attention to virtualization (Hyper-V), which is his recent preoccupation. He bears large number of Microsoft industrial certificates. Since 2012, he is Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Cloud and Datacenter Management. He is a regular speaker at various IT conferences in the region and abroad. Also, he is an IT Pro and Edu IT Pro User Group lead in Zagreb, Croatia. He spends his free time with people from the IT world, acquiring new knowledge, eagerly sharing it with others, while at the same time enjoying his life with his family.

He blogs at: http://blog.mlinar.biz/.

He was also a reviewer on Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices written by Romain Serre and Benedict Berger.

I would like to thank my wife Ana and to my lovely son Vito, for their kind and full support, their understanding, and encouragement. Without you guys I could not have followed my passion. You are the source of my inspiration and happiness.

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Table of Contents

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

Exploring Virtualization

Microsoft's history of virtualization

Understanding virtualization levels

Hardware/platform/server virtualization

Storage virtualization

Network virtualization

OS virtualization

Limitations of virtualization

Machine turn up time

Low resource utilization

Operational costs

Application packaging and deployment

Introduction to containerization

A few key implementations of containers

Docker

Docker architecture

Development life cycle

Docker's success stories

The road ahead for Dockers

Introduction to Windows Server Containers

A little background

Windows Server Container versions

Hyper-V Containers

Why another container type?

Containers terminology

Container host

Container OS image

Container images

Container registry

Dockerfile

Benefits of containers

Windows Server Containers on Azure

Comparing containerization and VM virtualization

Cluster management

Docker Swarm

Kubernetes

DC/OS

Tooling support

Visual Studio Tools for Docker

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Online

Docker for Windows

Docker Toolbox for Windows

Who else is working with containers?

Turbo

Rocket

Summary

Deploying First Container

Preparing the development environment

Containers on Windows 10

Windows Server Containers on-premise

Windows Server Containers on Azure

Container options on Windows Server 2016 TP5

Create Windows Server 2016 TP5 on Azure

Installing base OS images and verifying installation

Windows Server Containers development

Pulling images from Docker Hub

Preparing a Windows Containers image

Running web application in Docker

Creating a container

Decoding image preparation

FROM

MAINTAINER

LABEL

RUN

COPY

EXPOSE

CMD

Starting and stopping Docker Service

Summary

Working with Container Images

Listing images

Searching images

docker pull

docker run

Detached versus foreground mode

Name

Isolation technology

Overriding Dockerfile image defaults

docker build

Build context

Build Docker image

dockerignore

Docker tags

docker commit

docker exec

docker push

Cleaning up containers or images

Summary

Developing Container Applications

Setting up the development environment

Understanding .NET Core and ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core architecture

Hosting ASP.NET applications

Developing an ASP.NET Core application

The Music Store application

Deploying ASP.NET Core application as Windows Server Container

Dockerizing the application

Connecting the dots

Test and run on a developer machine

Hosting ASP.NET Core on IIS in Windows Server Container

Developing ASP.NET 4.5 applications as Windows Server Containers

Dockerizing ASP.NET 4.5 Web Application

Connecting the dots

Windows Server Container networking

Summary

Deploying Container Applications

Deploy Azure VMs using ARM

Configure VM for remote connectivity

Configuring remote Docker host

docker.pid

dockerd configuration options

Debug

max-concurrent-downloads

max-concurrent-uploads

Host

Security

Deploying containers remotely

Configuring load balancer

Deploy Hyper-V Containers

Pre-requisites

Steps to run Music Store as a Hyper-V Container

Dangling images

Summary

Storage Volumes

Storage volumes

Docker volumes

Sharing volumes

Music Store—store images using volumes

Deleting volumes

Relational databases and SQL Server container

Music Store—store data using SQL Server container

Summary

Redis Cache Containers

Creating Redis Cache container

Creating Redis image and container

Operating Redis Cache containers

Redis Desktop Manager

Publishing Redis container

Persistent Redis containers

Master-slave configuration

Integrating Redis containers with Music Store

Summary

Container Network

Introduction to Windows networking

Windows Containers--network management stack

Configuring container networks

Static port mappings

Disconnecting containers from network

Limitations of WinNAT network implementation

Networking modes

Transparent

L2 bridge or L2 tunnel

Multiple container networks

Container network routing

Single node

Multinode

Multi-subnet deployment of Music Store

Managing Docker networks using Windows PowerShell for Docker

Summary

Continuous Integration and Delivery

Introduction to Visual Studio Team Services

Continuous integration

Signing up for a VSTS account

Uploading Music Store to VSTS

Configuring automated builds

Why do we need a custom build agent?

Custom build agent

Queuing build

Continuous delivery

Configuring service principal name

Configure staging environment

Configure the production environment

Testing CI/CD

Summary

Manage Resource Allocation and REST API

Container resource allocation

CPU resource allocation

Memory allocation

Network allocation

Insights and telemetry

Application Insights

Operations Management Site

Optimizing Dockerfiles

Optimizing image size

Optimize build speed

Ordering instructions

Docker REST API

List containers

Create container

Start/stop container

Removing a container

Docker .NET SDK

List containers

Creating a container

Starting a container

Stopping a container

Removing a container

Downloading an image

Summary

Composite Containers and Clustering

Orchestrating multi-container deployment using docker-compose

A docker-compose file reference

Build options

Naming containers

Dependencies

Named volumes

Docker CLI options

Start/stop services

Building images

Creating containers

Executing commands

Killing commands

Pause or unpause

Scale

Cluster management

Docker Swarm architecture

Setting up a swarm cluster

Generate SSH key

Create swarm cluster on Azure Container Service

Docker Swarm features

Summary

Nano Server

A brief introduction to Nano Server

Benefits of running workloads on Nano Server

Live migrations

Zero footprint

Package management

Reboots

Provisioning time

Server management

PowerShell core

Provisioning Nano Server on Azure

Provisioning Nano Server on Windows 10

Package management

Deploy .NET Core applications on Nano Server

Configuration management using PowerShell DSC

Nano containers

Summary

Preface

Containers is the next breakthrough in building modern and cloud based applications, comparing it with its predecessors like VM virtualization one would realize that containerization is the fastest, most resource-efficient, scalable, and secure way of building application hosting environments we know so far. Learning Windows Server Containers take you through a long and profound journey of building containerized ASP.NET applications on latest windows server platforms using Docker command line and Docker REST API. The book shows you how to build and ship containers from one environment to other with less hassle during the continuous integration and delivery process. You will learn to build containerized applications using scalable storage containers, cache containers with isolation levels like in VMs. The book helps you build an ecosystem of container hosts, manage composite container deployments, and resource governance.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Exploring Virtualization, teaches you different virtualization levels, challenges with each type of virtualization, containers as a virtualization platform, and benefits of running containerized applications, tooling support, other container platforms available in market today.

Chapter 2, Deploying First Container, teaches you to set up development environment, understand the Docker terminology, installing images from Docker Hub, create custom windows container images using Docker CLI and authoring Dockerfile.

Chapter 3, Working with Container Images, will introduce you to common container management tasks such as listing the containers, start/stop, cleaning up unused containers or images using Docker CLI on Windows Server environment.

Chapter 4, Developing Container Applications, teaches you to create and deploy ASP.NET Core Web applications using Visual Studio 2015, .NET Core, and C# to Windows Server 2016 Core as Windows Container using PowerShell and Docker CLI.

Chapter 5, Deploying Container Applications, teaches you to create Windows Server Container environment on Azure using Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure PowerShell, configure remote management for container hosts, deploy container applications remotely as Windows Containers and Hyper-V containers, configuring software load balancer and so on.

Chapter 6, Storage Volumes, talks about building file based storage based containers using Docker volumes and relational database containers using Microsoft SQL Server.

Chapter 7, Redis Cache Containers, teaches you to create persistent Redis Cache containers using Redis and storage volumes.

Chapter 8, Container Network, introduces you to Windows Container networks, different networking modes, building custom container networks using different networking modes and deploying containers on custom networks.

Chapter 9, Continuous Integration and Delivery, teaches you to build continuous integration and deployment pipelines for container applications using Visual Studio Team Services (TFS Online) on Azure, Docker Hub, and Git. You will learn to create a create a custom build server for building, packaging and releasing containers to windows container hosts.

Chapter 10, Manage Resource Allocation and REST API, teaches you to manage container resource utilization, create and manage containers using Docker REST API via Postman and C#, image optimization strategies and monitoring options available for containers and container hosts.

Chapter 11, Composite Containers and Clustering, teaches you to orchestrate multiple container deployments using Docker Compose, set up scaling for multicontainer environments and authoring Docker Compose service definition. Also, you will learn the concepts of cluster management using Docker Swarm and Azure Container Service.

Chapter 12, Nano Server, serves as an introduction to Windows Nano Server, building custom Nano Server images using PowerShell, deploying containers on Nano Server, working with Nano containers, and configuring Nano Server using PowerShell DSC.

What you need for this book

This book assumes basic knowledge of PowerShell, C#, .NET, ASP.NET 5, cloud computing, and Azure. The book will help your setup development environment on desktop operating system like Windows 10 (with Anniversary update) and deploying container applications on VMs running on-premise and on Azure. To practice building containerized applications on an on-premise environment like Windows 10, the host machine should have Hyper-V feature enabled. The book shows building virtual environments using Windows 10 built-in feature called Hyper-V but you can try any other desktop virtualization software like VMware or virtual box. The book also uses Visual Studio 2015 for application development, if you have hands-on experience working with Visual Studio 2015 it will easy to execute the samples. Following is the basic hardware configuration for running Hyper-V and Visual Studio 2015:

CPU: 1.6 GHz or faster processor, 4 cores

64-bit processor with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) – (for Hyper-V only)

CPU support for VM Monitor Mode Extension (VT-c on Intel CPU's) – (for Hyper-V only)

Minimum of 8 GB RAM

Disk space: 80 GB

Apart from the these, you will also need an Azure subscription for creating container environments on Azure. Microsoft offers a free subscription which can be used for 30 days in-case you do not have a paid subscription. The software requirements for the book are as follows:

Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition or above)

Windows 10 with Anniversary update

SQL Server Management Studio

Redis Desktop Manager

Postman

Internet connectivity is required to install any packages for application development, download images (ISO files) for windows server 2016 or source code from GitHub repository.

Who this book is for

The primary target audience for this book would be developers who would like to use Windows Server Containers to build portable apps that can run anywhere (laptop, server, and public or private cloud) without little or no changes to the code. Developers will be able to build and ship high-quality applications. As Windows Containers has a broad impact on developers and administrators alike, this book will also help IT professionals or DevOps Engineers prepare infrastructure which is easy to use and maintain. IT professionals will be able to optimize resource utilization by increasing the density of applications per machine. The concepts discussed in this book also help DevOps develop a container mindset, establish practices around publishing developed code as containers from development environment to production easily.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The remove() method finds the first instance of the element (passed an argument) and removes it from the list.

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

    docker search microsoft

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Click on Test Connection and ensure the connection is successful.

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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Customer support

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Downloading the example code

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Errata

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Questions

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Exploring Virtualization

In this highly competitive and rapidly changing world, for enterprises to be at the leading edge a highly reliable, cost effective, and infinitely scalable IT infrastructure is required. It is very important for enterprises to adapt to changing customer needs, fail fast, learn, and reinvent the wheel. Ever since hardware costs have come down the emphasis has shifted to making the most out of the capital investments made on physical infrastructure or reducing the amount of investments to build or rent new infrastructure. This fundamentally means running more applications/services out of the existing IT landscape.

Virtualized infrastructure solves the preceding problems and it caters to all the IT needs of a modern enterprise. Virtualization provides an abstraction