Containers on Windows? You’ll have to upgrade to 10

Windows 10: Containers are the future, and here's what you need to know -  TechRepublic

In my last post, I shared my opinion on how I could see containerized development environments being beneficial to resource deprived developers where VMs may not be a viable option.

The DevOps Specialist

Investigating further into my muse with regards windows environments I unfortunately hit a fairly large road block.  Currently the only way that you can run a containerized environment is to either upgrade to windows 10 or set it up on Windows Server 2016.

As windows 7 is now off the active development list and receiving bug and security fixes only, there is very little hope that windows containers will ever be seen on there.  Containerization is still a relatively new idea in terms of managing infrastructure and application deployments so it’s too early to say what effect this will have in the long term strategy and uptake of it, but according to Stack Overflow’s recent developer survey to 2016, while Windows 7 has lost a lot of ground over the last couple of years, MacOS has lept ahead now accounting for 26.2% of the market share, stretching ahead of Linux for the second consecutive year running with a not to shabby 21.7%.

Compared to the 2015 figures, the survey does suggest that many of the new windows 10 adopters appear to have come from over half of the Windows 8 users and a third from 7 so as a Development OS, Windows 7 is certainly in decline however some of those systems have also been lost to the growing market of Mac OS and Linux. Could this be the year that Windows as a Development Operating System dips below that magic 50% mark?

For now it looks like containers are just outside of the reach for many windows development environments unless they make the push to upgrade to 10.  I think it’s safe to say they still remain more of a Linux based infrastructure tool for the time being.  Will windows 10 kick off or kill windows containers?  Only time will tell.