First feedback elicitation

[nuest]

I wanted to learn more about Windows Containers and tried to create a Container with R. It worked! It's nowhere near the Rocker Images, but I hope the name rocker-win is fine with @cboettig and @eddelbuettel.

What works?

• Dockerfile based on microsoft/windowsservercore
• Automatic build on AppVeyor: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/nuest/rocker-win/history
• Deployment to Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/nuest/rocker-win/
• Running from Docker Hub works: docker run -it nuest/rocker-win

@StefanScherer your work at https://github.com/StefanScherer/dockerfiles-windows was a great help! Thanks!

If you have access to a recent Windows machine, I'd love to hear your feedback! But please don't ask me about a relevant use case for this just yet :-).

[eddelbuettel]

I was very confused when I saw the tweets a few minutes ago and already DM you. Could one of you two in the know (ie @StefanScherer, @nuest) point me to some intro documentation about what a "Windows Container" is, and why one should care? [ To me, the point of Docker is plainly that ... development life and deployment is saner on Linux. Is this an attempt by Redmond to pull people back because ... PowerShell or SQL Server whatever the hotness is? I thought we all lived in the cloud now and no longer cared about what OS accesses things? ;-) ]

[StefanScherer]

@eddelbuettel Beginning with Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise and Windows Server 2016, Microsoft provides to run Docker as a Windows Service to provide the same advantages as we know it on Linux.
Easily package your Windows app, run it without all the dependency hell. Run different versions of an app on the same machine without conflicts, etc.

The Microsoft docs about Windows containers can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/

I don't think that it is an attempt to pull people back, as eg. PowerShell and SQL Server had the complete opposite way and now run natively on Linux as well ;-)

Correct, we live in the cloud now and I assume lot of the workload and containers run on Linux. But there are still Windows Servers out there and Windows workload where this adoption to Containers brings advantages on that "other" OS as well ;-)

[eddelbuettel]

I see. So instead of having to worry about the virtualbox layer and its footprint, you now get to worry whether Microsoft captures all system calls? Hm. I guess there's a flavour for everyone then ...

But yes, if it works it may well have upside over VMware-wrapping whole Windows servers though.