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Recently, Rancher officially announced support for the technical preview level of the Kubernetes 1.14 Windows container!

When Rancher 2.1.0 was released in October 2018, Rancher provided experimental support for Windows containers. This year, both SIG Windows and Microsoft have announced that Windows Server 2019 for Kubernetes 1.14 is available in production, so now Rancher is constantly releasing a new version of Rancher 2.3.0 Preview 1 to support the latest version of the Windows container (and Kubernetes)! This version is still in the technical preview phase and will be officially GA after more testing and iteration.

Industry demand for Windows containers

There is no denying that Windows is still one of the most popular operating systems in data centers. There are countless workloads of countless enterprises running on different versions of Windows systems.

With the rise of containers, DevOps teams have been able to simplify and accelerate the delivery of their Linux applications. However, Windows-based applications still need to be treated differently. Whether it is the need to quickly create and dismantle development / test environments that are always updated, or to upgrade legacy applications to the cloud, support for Windows containers has been one of the most needed technologies in the industry in recent years.

How Rancher will support Windows containers

Users who create a "custom" cluster in Rancher will see the option to add Windows or Linux nodes to their cluster. Where the etcd and control plane nodes can only be Linux nodes, and the UI of Rancher automatically selects this option. But the worker node can be Windows or Linux. We recommend that users create separate clusters for their Windows workloads. You may still need to add at least one Linux worker node (to run Ingress, Rancher cluster agent, metrics server, and so on). Flannel can be used as the preferred network plug-in option for vxlan and host gateway modes.

Creating and managing Windows Server 2019 containers in Rancher is very simple. Refer to the documentation for a quick introduction to how to get started. However, users still need to pay attention to the relevant environmental requirements and some limitations:

You need Windows Server 2019 that comes with Docker EE-basic 18.09. You also need Kubernetes 1.14 and Rancher 2.3.0 Preview 1.

For Windows nodes, the host image must match the container base image. This means that every time you make a major upgrade to the host, you need to recreate the container image, otherwise the container may not function properly.

The network in the Windows container is exposed through the CNI plug-in. So far, Flannel is the only supported network plug-in.

Rancher's built-in Prometheus-based monitoring is not available for Windows.

The Etcd and control plane nodes can only be linux. You also need at least 1 Linux worker to make the cluster work properly.

Conclusion

The GA of Windows container is a great development and progress. While we must admit that there are still many limitations and challenges in adopting this technology, it is also clear that our users have been waiting for the containerization and modernization of their Windows applications. Rancher 2.3.0's support for Windows containers is bound to make the journey faster and easier.

For the full release notes and installation steps for Rancher 2.3.0 Preview 1, please visit:

Https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.3.0-alpha3

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