Exercise 2

Using Containers

Containers introduce a lightweight form to define infrastructure and application deployment. In windows we have recently, since Windows 2016, official support for Docker technology. This would be a great opportunity to define and run a multi-container Docker application with Docker Compose. Compose is great for development, testing, and staging environments, as well as CI workflows as it makes really easy to declaratively define a docker-compose.yml to create an isolated environment.

We will need a Docker Engine or even a Docker cluster where we can deploy this definition. Jenkins has also nice Docker plugins to communicate with a Docker API to create images and deploy them to an Engine or to the public Docker hub or a private Docker trusted registry.

This will be a proposal for a compose that leverages the official Microsoft images for Docker like IIS web server and SQL Server for Windows.

We will need a Dockerfile for our web application.

FROM microsoft/iis

RUN mkdir C:\site

RUN powershell -NoProfile -Command \
    Import-module IISAdministration; \
    New-IISSite -Name "Site" -PhysicalPath C:\site -BindingInformation "*:80:"

EXPOSE 80

ADD content/ /site

And a compose file to orchestrate the whole deployment including a proxy to balance requests and the networks definition to wire them internally.

version: '2'
services:
  haproxy:
    image: tutum/haproxy
    depends_on:
      - web
      - sqlserver
    ports:
      – "80:80"
    networks:
      - webnet
  web:
    build: .
    depends_on:
      - sqlserver
    networks:
      - webnet
      - sqlnet
  sqlserver:
    image: microsoft/mssql-server-windows
    networks:
      - sqlnet

networks:
  webnet:
  sqlnet:

We can then just launch our system with docker compose up. As I’m using Docker compose v2 here we can scale our web server with two instances with docker-compose scale web=2.

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