Devsisters Releases Guide for Windows Container Development Environment Setup and IIS Testing

Devsisters is conducting R&D to support Windows Server workloads, drawing on its experience building Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and has released a guide on how to set up a Windows container development environment. The most efficient development environment is a Windows 10 host that supports Hyper-V, and macOS or Linux users can use the development virtual machine images provided by Microsoft.

Preparing and Configuring the Development Environment

Docker for Desktop 2.0 or later is required for development. After installation, you need to switch from Linux container mode to Windows container mode via the tray icon. Unlike Linux VM-based mode, Windows container mode uses the host OS's features directly, resulting in faster loading speeds. Since enabling virtualization features may require a BitLocker recovery key, it is recommended to prepare this in advance.

IIS Web Server Container Testing

For a simple web server test, the process of writing and building an IIS-based Dockerfile is demonstrated. One point to note is that Windows container base images range in size from a minimum of 1GiB to a maximum of 4GiB, which may incur charges when using metered internet connections.

• Dockerfile Configuration: Based on the mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis image, an HTML file is copied to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot and port 80 is exposed.
• Running and Verification: After running the container with the docker run command, access http://localhost:8080 in a browser to verify that the page displays correctly.

This guide focused on understanding the basic operation of Windows containers, and the next installment will cover how to migrate NT services, commonly used in Windows backends, to containers.