It took me quite some time to finally have this running. But I am writing this to tell you that I probably made a bad choice after all...
Why I wanted to run a Linux-based app on a Windows server?? Never mind. That happens to life from time to time, doesn't it?
The idea originally came to me already back end of year 2020. I grabbed the script that we were running on a Linux server, and saw how easy it is to run it as is inside a container on my Windows laptop. That was super easy I recall. Encouraged, started the effort of deploying it onto one of our Windows servers.
Onto your workstation, you install the package called Docker Desktop. Super easy. Again.
However to a Windows server, you need to install what used to be called Docker Engine Enterprise. The installation was not a challenge. I found a lot of blog posts explaining it.
However (again) when I was in the middle of it, I found that the maintenance had been passed from Microsoft to a company called Mirantis. The most important change is that this package is no longer free. It is free, still at the time I am writing this, which is January 2022, but not after the year 2024. The devil is that when you have yourself busy with the installation following all those blogs, majority of which talk about the free Microsoft version, you would never imagine that it is becoming a paying package. By the time you found it out, you spent quite some time on it already. Going for an alternative, throwing all the time and effort into garbage is quite discouraging...
This is the first reason that I qualify it as a wrong choice.
The second was that the capability of running Linux containers on it had been said "experimental" and the development has now stopped. Here reads as development has now stopped in favor of running docker natively on Linux in WSL2. The WSL feature is available only on the desktop edition Windows such as Windows 10 as of today, not with the server OSs. It may never be...
In addition, I recently received an email to announce that the above mentioned Docker Desktop package for your development will soon become a paying software too.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with charging users with a fee. But I do not really like this practice of allowing to start with no fee, and starting charging once users have developed a lot and become unable to operate without it.
