Sunday, September 6, 2015

Explaining Windows Server Containers – Part One

You have heard a lot about it lately, Microsoft is speeding up on their container investment and we can see the early beginning in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3.

But before we start to go deep into the container technology in TP3, I would like to add some more context so that you more easily can absorb and understand what exactly is going on here.

Server Virtualization

Container technologies belongs to the virtualization category, but before we explain the concept and technology that gives us “containerization”, we will take a few steps back and see where we are coming from.

Server (virtual machine) virtualization is finally mainstream for the majority of the industry by now.
We have been using virtualization in order to provide an isolated environment for guest instances on a host to increase machine density, enable new scenarios, speed up test & development etc.

Server virtualization gave us an abstraction where every virtual machine were in the belief of that they had their own CPU, I/O resources, memory and networking.
In the Microsoft world, we first started with server virtualization using a type 2 hypervisor, such as Virtual Server and Virtual PC – where all the hardware access was emulated through the operating system itself, meaning that the virtualization software was running in user mode, just as every other application on that machine.
So a type 2 Hypervisor have in essence two hardware abstraction layers, turning them all into bad candidates for real world workloads.

This changed with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, where Microsoft introduced their first type 1 hypervisor.
Hyper-V is a microkernelized hypervisor that implements a shared virtualization stack and a distributed driver model that is very flexible and secure.
With this approach, Microsoft had finally a hypervisor that could run workloads considered as “always-on” and also based on x64 architecture.

I don’t have to go through the entire story of Hyper-V, but to summarize: Hyper-V in these days reminds you a bit of VMware – only it is better!

As stated earlier, server virtualization is key and a common requirement for cloud computing. In fact, Microsoft wouldn’t have such a good story today if it wasn’t for the investment they made in Hyper-V.
If you look closely, the Cloud OS vision with the entire “cloud consistency” approach derives from the hypervisor itself.

Empowering IaaS

In Azure today, we have many sophisticated offerings around the Infrastrucutre as a Service delivery model, focusing on core compute, networking and storage capabilities. Also, they have taken this a step further where we can use something called VM extensions in our virtual machines, so that during provisioning time – or post deployment, we can interact with the virtual machine operating system to perform some really advanced stuff. Examples here could be deployment and configuration of a complex LoB application.

Microsoft Azure and Windows Azure Pack (Azure technologies on-prem) has been focusing on IaaS for a long time, and today we have literally everything we need to use any of these cloud environments to rapidly instantiate new test & dev environments, spinning up virtual machine instances in isolated networks and fully leverage the software-defined datacenter model that Microsoft provides.

But what do we do when virtual machines aren’t enough? What if we want to be even more agile? What if we don’t want to sit down and wait for the VM to be deployed, configured and available before we can verify our test results? What if we want to maximize our investments even further and increase the hw utilization to the maximum?

This is where containers comes handy and provides us with OS virtualization.

OS Virtualization

Many people have already started to compare Windows Server Containers with technologies such as Server App-V and App-V (for desktops).
Neither of these comparisons are really true, as Windows Server Containers covers a lot more and has some fundamental differences when looking at the architecture and use cases. 
The concept, however, might be similar, as App-V technologies (both for server and desktop) aimed to deliver isolated application environments, in its own sandbox. Things could either be executed locally or streamed from a server. 

Microsoft will give us two options when it comes to container technology:
Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers.

Before you get confused or starts to raise questions: You can run both Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers within a VM (where the VM is the Container host). However, using Hyper-V Containers would require that Hyper-V is installed.

In Windows Server Container, the container is a process that executes in its own isolated user mode of the operating system, but where the kernel is shared between the container host and all of its containers.
To achieve isolation between the Containers and the Container Hosts, namespace virtualization is used to provide independent session namespace and kernel object namespace isolation per container
In addition, each container is isolated behind a network compartment using NAT (meaning that the container host has a Hyper-V Virtual Switch configured, connected to the containers).

For applications executing in a container process, all file and registry changes are captured through their respective drivers (file filter driver and registry filter). System state are shown as read-only to the application.

With this architecture of Windows Server Containers, it is very likely that this is an ideal approach for applications within the same trust boundary since the host kernel and APIs are shared among the containers. Windows Server Containers is the most optimized solution when reduced start-up time is important to you.

On the other hand, we also have something called Hyper-V Containers (this is not available in Technical Preview 3).
A Hyper-V Container provides the same capabilities as Windows Server Containers, but has its own (isolated) copy of the Windows kernel and memory directly assigned to them. There is of course pros and considerations with every type of technology, and with Hyper-V Containers you will achieve more isolation and better security, but have a less efficient start-up and density compared to Windows Server Containers.

The following two pictures shows the difference between server virtualization and OS virtualization (Windows Server Containers)

Server Virtualization

OS Virtualization

So, what are the use cases for Windows Server Containers?

It is still early days with Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 so things are subject to change.
However, there are things we need to start to think about right now when it comes to how to leverage containers.

If you take a closer look at Docker (which has been doing this for a long time already), you might get a hint of what you can achieve using container technology.

Containers aren’t necessarily the right solution for all kind of applications, scenarios and tools you may think of, but gives you a unique opportunity to speed up testing, development and to effectively enable DevOps scenarios that embraces continuous delivery.

Containers can be spun up in seconds and we all know that having multiple new “objects” in our environment can also lead to a demand of control and management that also introduces us for a new toolset.

I am eager to share more of my learning of Windows Server Containers with you, and will shortly publish part two of this blog series.



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