Tip of the Day: Bringing Device Support to Windows Containers

Today's tip...

I’m really excited about today’s tip.

Why? Because it’s nerdy coolness and I like it! Oh, and it also represents a great leap forward in the support of Ccontainer technologies on the Windows platform.

Summary

When we introduced containers to Windows with the release of Windows Server 2016, our primary goal was to support traditional server-oriented applications and workloads. As time has progressed and the utility of containers as a technology is becoming fully realized, we’re now seeing containers playing an important role in enabling Internet of Things (IoT) workloads through Azure IoT Edge. We’ve seen new types of workloads getting containerized—workloads that rely on talking to peripheral devices and sensors (a problem for Windows containers). We’re introducing support for certain host device access from Windows Server containers, beginning in Insider Build 17735 to enable new Windows IoT use cases and transform capabilities for existing server workloads. We’re introducing support for ‘select’ host device access from Windows Server containers.

Read the full blog and watch a brief demo video here.