and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that split out the bits actually responsible for running a container from Moby, in order to make them more reusable for other use cases like Kubernetes. containerd is a project started by Docker Inc. Microsoft has recently gravitated toward containerd as its focus area for running containers on Windows Server. It’s a simple installer wrapping official binaries from Docker Inc., and since it’s open source, you can build it yourself to help secure your supply chain further. If you must go this route, a superior community-provided solution exists in Stevedore, an open source project that simplifies installation of an up-to-date version of Docker CE along with useful components not currently present in the official Windows distribution, such as Docker Compose. Likewise, Docker CE for Windows is currently provided as a simple zip file missing additional components like Compose, and without automation of much of the setup work, like registering services and installing firewall rules required to have a useful install. While Microsoft offers a script to install “Docker CE,” it actually installs (outdated) nightly binaries from the Moby project (skipping some components normally present in Docker CE, and without codesigning). However, it’s worth noting that Docker CE is currently challenging to use on Windows. and distributed with a selection of additional tools and components. Docker Desktop requires a GUI for many interactions, and is not available for Windows Server.ĭocker CE is likely what most people think of when they think of “Docker”-it’s a distribution of Moby built by Docker Inc.

However, it is important to note that Docker Desktop is really only appropriate for developer machines and non-automated workflows. Docker Desktop can switch between so-called LCOW and WCOW (Linux Containers on Windows, and Windows Containers on Windows) and supports a broad set of features including extensions. (You’ll notice a theme among the options here-three of these four options sit downstream of Moby.)Īvailable in a free trial, MCR is notable for providing an easy way to build and run containers and delivering the benefits of Moby with FIPS-140-2 validation, container-signing, and enterprise support.Ī developer-centric solution, Docker Inc.’s GUI-driven Docker Desktop can run and build Windows containers on Windows 10 and 11. Mirantis Container Runtimeįormerly known as Docker Engine - Enterprise, Mirantis Container Runtime is an enterprise-grade downstream implementation of the open source Moby project with a particular emphasis on security. There are four major tools you will want to consider for running and working with containers on Windows and overall Windows container management. What tools are available to help me run and work with containers on Windows And Windows containers can be isolated via Hyper-V, where the kernel is not shared-but this is not the default on Windows Server.) You can run Linux containers on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux, but it usually isn’t the smoothest experience and we don’t recommend it for running production workloads-this is mostly useful for development. (Okay, nothing’s ever really that simple. Windows containers run on Windows hosts and Linux containers run on Linux hosts and never the twain shall meet. What this means in practice is that while containers are highly portable, they still need to be built with a target kernel (and architecture) in mind. Containers achieve a smaller footprint in part by sharing the host machine’s OS kernel (and creating a sandbox with namespaces to provide an isolated view of the world, similar to a ‘normal’ machine). When you run a workload on a virtual machine, you simulate an entire machine-within-a-machine-from the operating system kernel on up to the application, and everything in between. To answer this one, we need to take a step back and consider the architecture of a container.

What’s the difference between Windows containers and Linux containers?