Create Windows Containers in Azure Web App

In this article, I will show you how to create a Windows Container in Microsoft Azure using Azure App Service (preview) service that was released as a public preview today.

The new feature was just released as a public preview and I decided to try and show you how easy it is to create a Windows Container in Azure without settings up a Container host \ cluster.

Windows Containers in Azure

The new service now brings Windows Containers to Microsoft Azure like AKS by simplifying the deployment of containers without installing a Container host as a Virtual Machine.

With the public release, the Windows Containers Images are supported

• microsoft/iis:windowsservercore-ltsc2016, latest
• microsoft/iis:nanoserver-sac2016
• microsoft/aspnet:4.7.2-windowsservercore-ltsc2016, 4.7.2, latest
• microsoft/dotnet:2.1-aspnetcore-runtime
• microsoft/dotnet:2.1-sdk

Features

• Deploy images directory from Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry or private registry.
• Web apps can be scaled easily using auto-scale
• Win-Rm access to containers (disabled by default)
• Allow SSL only and add custom domain \ Certificate

I have to say that I was excited to see this service going public because up until now deploying Windows Containers was a process that involved many steps.

Get started

To get started, I will use the Microsoft Azure Portal App Services icon

Next, I will search for Web App for Containers

I will create my Web App and specify Windows (Preview) Containers as the OS which will allow me to use Windows Containers.

From the App Service plan, I will select a plan, In my case, I will PC2 which gives me 2x Cores and 8GB of RAM memory.

Because this is a new feature Azure gives 50% discount on Windows Container for a limited time.

Images

From the container Settings page, I will select the image location and as you can see I have a few options.

I will go ahead and use the Microsoft/iis:latest image to run an IIS server

I will click create to start the build process of my Windows Container

Access the Container

To access the container I will click on the Web App and settings and click on URL

I also modify some of the settings from the Application Settings menu

After I click on the container it opens my browser and shows me the IIS welcome page.

In my next article, I will show you how to connect to a Windows Container using Win-RM.