Day Two Cloud 137: Automating Windows Container Builds

Today’s Day Two Cloud gets into the weeds of a real-world project build around Windows containers. Windows containers? Yes, the goal was to run a particular job and deploy it on Kubernetes using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Our guest is Sai Gunaranjan, Principal Architect for a large healthcare company. We discuss: * Why Windows containers instead of Linux * The pipeline Sai had in place before and what the team replaced it with * The build creation process and pipeline * Challenges with and benefits of the build process * Why the company eventually went back to Windows VMs * Lessons learned Takeaways: 1. Windows Containers are real 🙂 and they work 2. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/ Sponsor: StrongDM StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. StrongDM proxies connections between your infrastructure and Sysadmins, giving your IT team auditable, policy-driven, IaC-configurable access to whatever they need, wherever they are. Find out more at StrongDM.com/packetpushers. Tech Bytes: Singtel In this Tech Bytes episode we welcome back Singtel to discuss real-life examples of WAN problems from Singtel customers and how Singtel helped solve them, including deploying broadband Internet to augment MPLS circuits and getting better performance visibility into the WAN. Show Links: @asgr86 – Sai Gunaranjan on Twitter Asgr.medium.com – Sai’s blog Sai on LinkedIn GitHub Actions Virtual Environments – GitHub Day Two Cloud 128: DevOps’ing All The Things – Packet Pushers Transcript: [00:00:01.210] – Ethan Sponsor StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. StrongDM proxies connections between your infrastructure and Sysadmins, giving your It team auditable, policy driven IaC configurable access to whatever they need, need, wherever they are. Find out more at StrongDM.com slash PacketPushers. [00:00:36.030] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today we’re going to be talking about containers, but not just any containers. Windows Containers. That’s right. What did you think of all that, Ethan? [00:00:46.740] – Ethan Oh, come on, man. It’s not even fair. This is not my thing. You know how you feel when I get into some. I don’t know, BGP conversation with someone you’re like. Oh, networking fun. [00:00:56.030] – Ethan That was a little bit of me in this one. Because this Windows Containers conversation Ned, got super nerdy and deep talking about pipelines, the challenges of deploying various things in Containers, the shortcomings thereof, and why ultimately. Containers may be weren’t the right answer for our guest. [00:01:11.820] – Ned Yeah, and our guest is Sai Gunaranjan. He’s a principal architect at a major healthcare company. And if you think you hear planes taking off, that’s not his mind taking off. He actually does live near an airport, but his mind also was just going 1 million mile an hour and we were struggling to keep up.