Is Docker finally ready for the age of serverless computing? That’s the message from the announcement this week of native Docker container support for Windows Server 2016.
If you’ve been following Docker for a while, you know that Docker containers originally supported only Linux operating systems. Then, Docker made its platform available for Windows users, too—but with the major caveat that Docker Engine ran inside a Linux-based virtual machine image on top. So, you could run Docker from Windows, but Linux was still the middleman.
Real Docker Containers
This week, that all changed. On Sept. 26, Docker announced the general availability of native Docker container support on Windows Server 2016. By “native,” Docker means that the containers run using new primitives—the equivalent of namespaces in Linux—that are built into the Windows kernel itself. There’s no more virtualization.
But that’s not all. The complete Docker tool set also now runs natively on Windows. The Docker CLI, Swarm orchestration, data volumes and all the other building blocks of a Dockerized infrastructure are officially compatible, as well as Docker containers themselves.
The support is the result of more than two years of collaboration between Docker and Microsoft, which is now a Top Five contributor to the Docker open-source project.
Caveats
Native support for Docker is a big accomplishment. But there are still some limitations, including:
- Docker containers can only run natively on Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. Other versions won’t work with Docker because they lack the kernel enhancements necessary to support Docker containers, Scott Johnston, Docker COO, explained in an interview.
- Some advanced networking configuration features for Docker are not yet supported because the “plumbing” required to make those features work is not complete inside the kernel, Johnston said, adding Microsoft is working to change that.
- Most notably, Docker containers on Windows can only run Windows apps inside the containers. In other words, you can’t run an app compiled for Linux inside a Docker container running on Windows. You would need a Windows host to do that. (And the opposite holds true: You can’t run Windows apps inside Docker containers on a Linux host.) This is not something that will change, according to Johnston.
Docker Becomes Serverless
Docker the company is celebrating the support as an opportunity to expand the Docker ecosystem immensely. Support for Windows “doubles the potential market opportunity” for Docker partners, the company said in a presentation about the announcement. (By the way, Docker has good reason to want to keep its partners happy by giving them a larger ecosystem to work with. The integration of Swarm into Docker earlier this year undercut the value of some of Docker’s partners’ products. But I digress.)
The most interesting aspect of this news from a DevOps perspective, however, is that it means Docker is now much more serverless. A large part of the value of Docker containers is their ability to simplify application delivery. As long as you can package your app as a Docker container, you can deploy it on any server that has Docker running.
You don’t have to think about the underlying server hardware or configuration. In other words, Docker allows you to become serverless, because you no longer have to think very much about the server you are deploying to.
Previously, however, this flexibility was limited by the fact that you did have to think about the server OS. Now, with native Docker support for Windows, that’s no longer the case. It doesn’t matter whether your infrastructure is composed of Windows servers, Linux servers or both. As long as you install Docker on them, you can deploy to any server.
Of course, there is still the issue of having to make sure your app is compiled for the right operating system. But that is easy enough to manage in most cases during the build process.
