The next level of virtualization is containers as they provide a better solution than virtual machines within Hyper-V, as containers optimize resources by sharing as much as possible of the existing container platform.
This chapter will describe the basics of containers, how to design and implement them, and how to choose the proper solution for orchestrating containers. You will get an overview of how Azure can help you to implement services based on containers and get rid of traditional virtualization stuff with redundant OS resources that need to be managed, updated, backed-up, and optimized.
Containers started with Docker in Linux and came to Windows Server version 2003, without any official feature statement or public announcement because it has been driven by Microsoft Azure, and was a feature that had been used and proofed there for years before Windows Server 2016 Container Services in Windows was officially announced and used.
One of the best things is that a container could be run on Linux and on Windows as a container host, without modifications if the service is built up properly, and without breaking the barriers and modifying the general concept of containers.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Technical design of containers
- Designing microservices
- Container registries
- Container instances
- Container orchestration
- Azure Container Service (ACS)