Containers on Azure
Within Microsoft Azure, virtual machines offer many platforms to choose from. These include many Linux distributions such as CoreOS, SUSE, Ubuntu and Red Hat, as well as Windows-based systems. As mentioned before, we will focus on Docker containers in this book. Docker is currently the most popular container technology and the Docker ecosystem is growing at a very fast pace. Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Docker, Inc., which contains an agreement that the open-source Docker engine that builds and runs Docker containers is available in Windows Server 2016. Windows Server containers use the Docker runtime and enable developers who are familiar with the Windows ecosystem to develop container-based solutions. At the time of writing, Windows containers are still in preview. We will have an online chapter about Windows containers after they debut in Windows Server 2016.
Can I Run Linux Containers on Windows and Vice Versa?
The short answer is no. Remember that containers are based on operating system level virtualization, and as such share the kernel of the host they are running on. Windows and Linux systems have fundamentally different kernels, and as a result you can only run Windows containers on Windows systems and Linux containers on Linux systems.