Microsoft’s flagship operating system operates quite differently from Linux—which looks to be be a problem as containers become the preferred way of computing in the cloud. Microsoft is reshaping Windows. Last year Microsoft announced that it would add Linux-like container technology to a future version of Windows. Now, the company has revealed that it’s also developing a super-slim version Windows Server Nano.
that will run what it describes as a new kind of container that provides an added level of security.
According to Microsoft spokesman Mike Schutz, the company is building a way of wrapping containers in its Hyper-V “virtualization” technology, so that they’re completely isolated from each other.
But the real news seems to be that Microsoft will offer a stripped-down operating system along the lines of CoreOS, a Linux operating system that’s particularly suited to running containers across a large number of computers. This kind of operating system represents the future of online services, which necessarily run on hundreds or even thousands of machines—or what industry marketers like to call the cloud.
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is revamping its technologies to suit the way the world is moving. Today’s Windows is such a large operating system that you need time to deploy it across many machines. In an age when you can so easily push Linux operating systems like CoreOS onto a vast array of computer servers, Windows is behind.
So its important that Windows Server Nano will offer containers to provides a way of encapsulating software so that developers and businesses can more efficiently move these containers from machine to machine, and also squeeze many of these onto the same machine, to take advantage of unused computing power.
The added security Microsoft provides with its “Hyper-V containers” is something that will appeal to only some organizations, such as government agencies that have extreme security requirements. Some agencies may need a way of tightly securing individual containers because they’re running alongside containers from other agencies. Regulations often require agencies to maintain complete software separation.
Many organizations now run containers atop public cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and that means they end up sharing computers with each other – containers run atop virtual machines, which provide the needed security.
The Hyper-V containers don’t make much sense in this situation—a situation that represents the future. But Microsoft must also appeal to a wide range of businesses, including government agencies. It must serve a new audience without losing the old one.
