Tuesday, March 26, 2019

K8S Support for Windows Containers

K8S has two components, the Master and the Worker. The Containers wrapped in Pods are executed on the Worker nodes, while the Master node schedules the Pods across the Worker nodes based on the resource availability and a couple of other factors like Taints and Tolerations. For K8S, the nodes in the Cluster combined is all like one big NODE or machine.


Till date both the Master and the Worker nodes in K8S used to run on different flavors of Linux and it was not possible to run Windows based workloads on K8S. Even in the Azure Cloud it was all Linux VMs for the Master and the Worker nodes.

With the new K8S 1.14 release support for Windows based Worker nodes has moved from Beta to GA, still the Master node is all on Linux only. Now it's possible to run/schedule Windows Containers through K8S on the Windows Worker nodes and not just through Docker Swarm.

While this is the most significant feature, along with this there are a couple of other features are introduced in K8S 1.14 release as mentioned here. There is a plan to blog about this and other new K8S features in the upcoming blogs in K8S official blog here. So, keep following the blog to get to know the latest around K8S.

 

This is a big thing as it enables Windows Containers to be scheduled in a K8S Cluster to take advantage of .NET runtime and the ecosystem Windows has to offer. And Microsoft gets a chance to push for more Windows based workloads on K8S. It surprises me that it took 4 years for adding Windows Container support to K8S, since it was released in 2015.

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