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HampyWG's avatar
HampyWG
Copper Contributor
Jul 28, 2021

Windows Server 2022 container base images?

With the removal of the Windows Server 2022 Insider Preview (build 20344), we have lost the only currently possible to validate process-isolated containers for Windows Server 2022.

 

Is there a plan to address this? There are no container base images matching the Windows Server 2022 Preview (build 20348), and the feedback issue I raised (as instructed here) doesn't seem to have attracted any interest.

 

Currently, projects like Moby (Docker Engine) depend on the Insider Preview builds to validate against and prepare for upcoming Windows Server releases , as there are no other mechanisms available, as the Windows Server SAC was tracking the Windows Client builds up until 2020, went silent for 2021, and is now dead.

    • JanRingos's avatar
      JanRingos
      Iron Contributor

      IDK but I still think the OS should be able to generate these images on demand and offline.

       

      And that Containers, core OS feature, should be usable without Docker, a third-party bloatware.

       

      But that's just me.

      • HampyWG's avatar
        HampyWG
        Copper Contributor
        Windows Containers _are_ usable without Docker. There's a pile of low-level command-line tools and libraries at https://github.com/microsoft/hcsshim/ that you can use, if you want to do all the state management and JSON writing/reading yourself. Those're what Docker uses currently. There's also https://github.com/containerd/containerd/ which can manage a lot of that for you (but not all, yet), and which Docker Engine will be hopefully be using for Windows in the next major release. Docker's been using containerd on Linux for years.

        You can even (with some limitations) build container images without Docker, although currently none of the other currently-working solutions, e.g., BuildKit's cross-build support or Google ko, support executing natively on Windows, so you can't use `RUN` directives in your Dockerfile. Once we have BuildKit native support for Windows working, Docker should be moving to support that directly, as it does on Linux.

        Docker is the glue that ties all this together, provides an API and CLI for it, keeps track of things like "Where are your container images on disk", downloads things off registries, etc. All the stuff that would be horrific if they were implemented in the OS directly, and tied to the OS update cycles. Some of those things did used to be implemented in the OS directly in Windows Server LTSC 2016, and it _was_ horrific, and we're still paying the cost of that until Windows Server LTSC 2016 ends support.

        But my definition of "bloatware" might be different to yours.
    • HampyWG's avatar
      HampyWG
      Copper Contributor

      Weijuan Shi Davis Thank you for publishing those images.

       

      I'm concerned that the Feedback Hub issue I raised weeks ago, despite being the place we were directed to send issue reports for non-Insider builds, seems to have seen no action, but a post here was apparently resolved overnight.

       

      There's also been an ongoing GitHub issue which touched these images being missing a week ago, although it wasn't the main point of the issue, so I can see how it might have been overlooked.

       

      Should I ignore Feedback Hub (and the instructions in the Preview announcement) and keep raising issues here?

      • Weijuan Shi Davis's avatar
        Weijuan Shi Davis
        Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
        Sorry for the inconvenience and not catching this problem early. It's a human error that I didn't know 20348 is the build of the eval until Mary forwarded me this thread. I also wanted to be honest that today I don't monitor either the Feedback Hub or here. I encourage you to report issues on containers at our GitHub community: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/issues. We do monitor there (even though we might be slow :)). Or you can find me on Twitter @WeijuanLand. Or email us at win-customers@microsoft.com.

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