Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Rethinking return-to-office mandates and a ridiculous, ancient Windows bug. (more…)
Tag: Windows Server
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Chef Brings DevOps to Windows Platform Migrations
Chef and Microsoft revealed today that they are working together to apply DevOps processes to accelerate the migration of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to more current versions.
Announced at the Microsoft Inspire conference, the goal is to enable organizations to leverage Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS), which includes an EAS Migration Accelerator for Windows that will scan existing .NET applications running on legacy Microsoft platforms to discover configuration and dependency details, then encapsulate that information as code in a way that enables the application to run on the latest version of a Microsoft virtual machine or as a container.
Ewan Dalton, partner development manager for Microsoft, said there are roughly a half-million .NET applications running on platforms that are scheduled for end-of-life support beginning in January. In an ideal world, most of those applications would be modernized to be deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud, said Dalton.
Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development at Chef, said rather than merely lifting and shifting legacy applications onto a new platform, Chef EAS will make it possible to employ DevOps processes to modernize how those applications are updated and maintained. Chef EAS makes it possible to, for example, scan, extract and package legacy applications and their dependencies, using source control repositories such as GitHub, and convert them into cloud platforms using pipelines such as Azure DevOps. Customers can deploy these application packages in Azure and run continuous security and compliance scans, added Ghosh.
The biggest challenge many organizations face when trying to migrate applications is the developers who created the application haves long since left the company. As such, most organizations only have documentation, which is usually sparse. They then must determine whether it is worth modernizing the application or whether they should simply replace it. In cases where it is deemed that the business logic contained within that legacy application is still critical enough to continue running, they need to find a way to automate that process as much as possible.
Longer-term, of course, most organizations will work to modernize legacy monolithic applications even further by slicing them up into a series of more manageable microservices. But many organizations are already running out of time when it comes to existing .NET applications. Once Microsoft ends support for the platforms they are running on, patches to address cybersecurity issues no longer will be provided as part of the standard licensing agreement. In effect, that means there is enough time between now and January to re-engineer an application. Chef EAS essentially throws organizations a lifeline to determine what they want to do next in terms of replacing a legacy application, said Ghosh.
Of course, there will always be some subset of the IT community that will continue to run .NET applications on outdated Microsoft platforms. It’s also unlikely that any of those organizations will be embracing DevOps processes to maintain those platforms anytime soon.
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Microsoft and Docker provide progress report on Docker for Windows Server
In the fall of 2014 Microsoft and Docker unveiled a new partnership—a commitment to work together to bring native support for Docker containers to the next major release of Windows Server. Earlier this week the two talked about the progress made so far and gave some clues to what customers should expect once the next Windows Server hits the street sometime in 2016.
Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, was in San Francisco this week at Docker headquarters meeting with his counterpart, Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes. The two met to talk about how their collaboration is progressing to bring Docker containers to Windows Server. The two didn’t share many specifics, but did say that the effort so far is achieving established goals and is proceeding according to the schedule they’ve laid out.
What is that schedule? We don’t really know. All Russinovich or Microsoft will commit to officially at this point is 2016. Whenever it arrives, though, it will represent a significant step forward in creating a platform-agnostic environment for developers. Windows developers will be able to integrate Docker containers natively with Windows Server, Visual Studio, and .NET applications.
The CTOs clarified that Docker support in Windows Server won’t allow Linux applications to run on a Windows operating system. Likewise, Windows applications in Docker containers won’t run on Linux. The value of the partnership and the integration of Docker support in Windows server is that developers will be able to leverage the same tools and common platforms for deploying, running, and managing the Docker container environment.
Microsoft Azure already added support for running Docker containers on Linux servers within the cloud platform. Once the new Windows Server hits, organizations will be able to run Docker containers on Linux or Windows and manage it all through Azure. It also enables developers to create application services running on opposing platforms and run it as part of a distributed application spanning both Windows and Linux.
The advantage from a Windows developer point of view is the ability to use the tools they’re familiar with. Developers will be able to use Visual Studio and .NET along with the built-in collaboration and workflow tools, as well as debugging and source-code control. It allows organizations to employ existing development practices and tools for creating and deploying Docker containers.
From a DevOps perspective the integration of Docker containers natively with Windows Server will enable better automation and continuity. DevOps and containers result in frequent changes to the app code and the underlying infrastructure, which is a bit of a culture shock for both traditional developers and traditional IT admins. Straddling the line between the two worlds by incorporating Docker containers and DevOps tools with the familiar Microsoft development platforms organizations are comfortable with takes some of the pain out of that cultural evolution.
Ultimately, the partnership between Docker and Microsoft will lay the foundation for completely platform-agnostic development. The app containers themselves may still require a specific OS to run, but at an organizational level the environment and infrastructure can be viewed and maintained as a holistic whole.
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Microsoft partners with Docker to bring containers to Windows Server
Docker has taken the DevOps world by storm, and that has caught the attention of Microsoft. Now, Microsoft and Docker are teaming up to bring native support for the container technology to the next generation(s) of Windows Server.
Docker is an open platform that enables organizations to run any application as a Docker container. The Docker containers can be implemented across virtually any infrastructure—delivering tremendous agility and flexibility for managing virtual applications. The container concept accelerates software development timeframes, and allows organizations to reduce costs and improve efficiency at the same time. It’s easy to understand why Docker is so popular.
There have been more than 21 million downloads of the Docker platform, and there are over 45,000 “Dockerized” applications available on the Docker Hub Registry, and 13,000-plus Docker-related projects on GitHub. Just last month Docker took in $40 million in another round of investment.
Major names in tech, like Rackspace, Google, and IBM have already pledged their support for Docker. Now Microsoft wants to bring the hot technology to Windows.
Docker Engine for Windows Server will allow customers to create Docker container applications that can run locally on Windows Server, or on virtual Windows Server instances in the cloud on Azure. In a blog post announcing the Docker partnership, Ross Gardler of Microsoft Open Technologies explains, “As part of this announcement, MS Open Tech is contributing code to the Docker client that supports the provisioning of multi-container Docker applications on Azure. This code removes the need for our cross-platform CLI to bootstrap the Docker host. In other words, we have taken a simple process and made it even simpler.
“This development is interesting because Docker has been a really fast moving technology having come out of almost nowhere a year ago to where now it is an incredibly widely supported technology,” stated Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst. “It is a bit of engineering but Microsoft wisely decided that they did not want to leave Windows developers out of the Docker party. This is good for Microsoft because those 45K ‘Dockerized’ applications will be able to run on Windows.”
To be fair, Microsoft isn’t completely new to Docker. Earlier this year it added support for Docker in Azure, but only on Linux. This new partnership launches an open source project to develop a Docker Engine runtime for building, running, and managing Docker containers natively within Windows Server. Docker Engine for Windows Server will be managed as a Docker open source project, but Microsoft will be a major contributor to the community.
The Microsoft blog post describes why Docker’s container technology is so important for the fast-paved development of a DevOps environment. “Containers do not include a full operating system, consequently rapid development and scaling of container-based applications is possible through very quick boot and restart operations. Furthermore, highly efficient creation of modified container images, by virtue of only capturing the differences between the original and new containers, enables improved management and distribution of containerized applications; the resulting images are both small and highly portable across almost any platform.”
Hilwa summed up with some thoughts about the new strategic vision of Microsoft. “What is even more interesting is that the work on the Docker engine in Windows is being done in open source—really showcasing the new Microsoft attitude towards open source (e.g. the open sourcing of Roslyn a few months ago). I really think we are seeing a faster and more open Microsoft, one that is more willing to integrate and collaborate with competing technologies without a lot of hesitation.”