Event details
What is the future of containers for Windows Server? The licensing is complex and it seems teams inside Microsoft are not using them or pushing them. Such as the .Net team and the SQL Server team. As customers we need to see Microsoft embracing Windows containers everywhere, not just as a "Oh that is a nice add on"
- Taylor BrownMay 12, 2026
Microsoft
We continue to see steady growth in their usage by both first- and third-party customers - for example Microsoft Teams, many of the M365 services many Bing services and others across Microsoft are dependent on Windows containers. We are actively investing in base functionality including networking optimizations (based on eBPF), patching and deployment optimizations and continually improving reliability/diagnosability/performance. For process isolated containers - such as what Kubernetes offers a valid Windows Server host license gives you unlimited (not limited by the license) containers, Hyper-V isolated containers are licensed similar to VMs with datacenter having unlimited (not limited by the license) instances and standard edition having 2 per instance.