In 2013, Solomon Hykes delivered a 5-minute lightning talk at PyCon called "The Future of Linux Containers" where he demonstrated Docker publicly for the first time. Docker was a product used internally at Solomon’s company dotCloud to power their PaaS solution, and then Docker was open-sourced and made freely available.
Docker exploded in popularity and in a few short years it matured from an exciting open-source project to a fully supported production-grade application platform. Large and small companies all over the world started moving new and existing applications to Docker without re-writing them, and gained increased efficiency, portability and security.
Microsoft saw the potential of Docker early on, and the Windows Server engineering team worked closely with Docker engineers to bring containers to Windows. In Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 you can run server applications in Windows Docker containers. You can run web servers, message queues, databases and console apps in any technology – .NET Framework, .NET Core, Java, Go, NodeJS. Any runtime that works on Windows will work in containers.
When you package and run applications in containers, they all have the same shape. You manage a Go application running in a Nano Server container in exactly the same way that you manage an ASP.NET WebForms app running in a Windows Server Core container. The whole process of packaging, distributing and running apps is consistent in Docker, which makes possible a new type of administration tool – one which gives you a single pane of glass to monitor and control all of your deployments and all of your apps in the same way.
I’ve presented conference keynotes on the theme "why containers will take over the world". I talk about the main use-cases for moving to Docker: containerizing traditional apps, transforming monoliths into microservices, accelerating new application deliveries, moving workloads between public and private clouds, and optimizing infrastructure by increasing density.
That’s pretty much every activity that’s happening in the IT industry, which is why Docker has evolved from a cool stack used by startups, to being a must-have platform for companies of any age and size. Docker on Windows is the book that will help you understand what Docker can do for you and why it’s such an important technology. Over the next 12 chapters you’ll learn everything from the Docker 101 to managing production workloads in a highly-available cluster, taking in app modernization, security and CI/CD on the way