2017 Highlights Series
If you’re a developer using the Windows platform, you’ll definitely want to watch this talk on what the Garden Windows team has been doing to bring Windows Server Containers to Cloud Foundry.
Matthew Horan and Sunjay Bhatia of VMware work on the Garden Windows team where they maintain the Windows Server 2012 R2 stack, which allows users to push their .NET application to a Windows 2012 VM. The team is now working on the Windows 2016 Stack — as well as Microsoft, who is also working on Windows Server Containers in the Windows Server 2016 Stack.
The team wanted to improve the experience for app developers and the Cloud Foundry Component team. Their primary goal is to create a first class .NET experience on Cloud Foundry — the same experience Java developers get on the Linux stack. However, due to the different architecture of Windows and Linux, the team faced unique challenges, which they describe in detail.
These days, containers are native concepts in modern Windows platforms. Windows containers are conceptually similar to Linux containers. The Garden Windows team wants to bring these capabilities to Cloud Foundry, in addition to adopting Cloud Foundry development patterns, and integrate more deeply with the Garden team so there is no separate Garden Windows BOSH release.
They also wanted to adopt industry standards with containers and take advantage of OCI (Open Container Initiative), runtime spec and image format spec, and emulate the Linux version of the runtime plugin runc. (The Garden Windows team uses its own runtime plugin called winc.)
Horan and Bhatia shared plans for the Windows Server 2016 Stack, including complete file system isolation and container rootfs that simplifies BOSH stemcell. They also showed a demo of apps running on the Windows 2016 stack, and shared the roadmap for GrootFS/OCi, Concourse work and Nano Server.
Watch the video to learn about the release cycle and planned improvements.
