Databases, containers and Kubernetes
Windocks is known for unique Windows SQL Server containers that are delivered in seconds, and are identical to a conventionally installed instance. This ensures compatibility with your software and infrastructure.
When combined with our database cloning, Windocks gives you the freedom to deliver clones to both SQL Server containers and instances.
Windocks goes beyond delivering containers and clones. Dockerfiles specify delivery of complete database environments, and can include Git operations, scripts, and data masking. This orchestration allows database environments to be delivered business-ready, with data security policies baked in. Windocks containers can also be orchestrated by Kubernetes, with an innovative design orchestrating both Windocks managed containers with cloned databases.
The benefits of containers are many:
1) It is common to run 50 or more containers on a single VM. Consider how this could simplify the support and maintenance of lower level environments.
2) Container are not subject to instance configuration drift. They are used, deleted, and replaced, rather than being maintained as a conventional instance.
3) Containers and the Docker API are a natural fit into enterprise DevOps processes. A single high level API call delivers a complete database environment, integrated with your application stack.
4) Containers hosted on a centralized server are the go-to solution for support of distributed teams. Teams connect to containers remotely from around the world.
Concepts in stateless applications and microservices
Containers - Containers are isolated lightweight processes running applications or microservices on different ports on a single machine. Containers are delivered from images which are built with all the software and information needed to deliver the containers.
Kubernetes - Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that runs multiple containers from multiple images in a cluster of machines.
Containers are used in dev, test, staging, production environments to run applications or services. An image is built, containers from that image are delivered into dev, test environments and as the containers pass tests in these environments, the build is promoted to staging and then production.
There is widespread use of containers for running stateless applications and microservices. Technologies such as docker enable delivery of containers with the application or microservice from images. For example, you can build an image of a .Net application using a dockerfile by specifying the version of .Net you use, the files that are needed to build the application/service, and the dotnet command to run. Once the image is built with docker, you can create containers, each running that service. Docker takes care of instrumenting all the dependencies, the files and starting the service in each container.
