Black lives matter.
We stand in solidarity with the Black community.
Racism is unacceptable.
It conflicts with the core values of the Kubernetes project and our community does not tolerate it.
We stand in solidarity with the Black community.
Racism is unacceptable.
It conflicts with the core values of the Kubernetes project and our community does not tolerate it.
With the release of Kubernetes v1.9, our mission of ensuring Kubernetes works well everywhere and for everyone takes a great step forward. We’ve advanced support for Windows Server to beta along with continued feature and functional advancements on both the Kubernetes and Windows platforms. SIG-Windows has been working since March of 2016 to open the door for many Windows-specific applications and workloads to run on Kubernetes, significantly expanding the implementation scenarios and the enterprise reach of Kubernetes.
Enterprises of all sizes have made significant investments in .NET and Windows based applications. Many enterprise portfolios today contain .NET and Windows, with Gartner claiming that 80% of enterprise apps run on Windows. According to StackOverflow Insights, 40% of professional developers use the .NET programming languages (including .NET Core).
But why is all this information important? It means that enterprises have both legacy and new born-in-the-cloud (microservice) applications that utilize a wide array of programming frameworks. There is a big push in the industry to modernize existing/legacy applications to containers, using an approach similar to “lift and shift”. Modernizing existing applications into containers also provides added flexibility for new functionality to be introduced in additional Windows or Linux containers. Containers are becoming the de facto standard for packaging, deploying, and managing both existing and microservice applications. IT organizations are looking for an easier and homogenous way to orchestrate and manage containers across their Linux and Windows environments. Kubernetes v1.9 now offers beta support for Windows Server containers, making it the clear choice for orchestrating containers of any kind.
Alpha support for Windows Server containers in Kubernetes was great for proof-of-concept projects and visualizing the road map for support of Windows in Kubernetes. The alpha release had significant drawbacks, however, and lacked many features, especially in networking. SIG-Windows, Microsoft, Cloudbase Solutions, Apprenda, and other community members banded together to create a comprehensive beta release, enabling Kubernetes users to start evaluating and using Windows.
Some key feature improvements for Windows Server containers on Kubernetes include:
Even though you have to continue running the Kubernetes Control Plane and Master Components in Linux, you are now able to introduce Windows Server as a Node in Kubernetes. As a community, this is a huge milestone and achievement. We will now start seeing .NET, .NET Core, ASP.NET, IIS, Windows Services, Windows executables and many more windows-based applications in Kubernetes.
A lot of work went into this beta release, but the community realizes there are more areas of investment needed before we can release Windows support as GA (General Availability) for production workloads. Some keys areas of focus for the first two quarters of 2018 include:
As we continue to make progress towards General Availability of this feature in Kubernetes, we welcome you to get involved, contribute code, provide feedback, deploy Windows Server containers to your Kubernetes cluster, or simply join our community.
Thank you,
Michael Michael (@michmike77)
SIG-Windows Lead
Senior Director of Product Management, Apprenda