The Pivotal Windows product team has been listening to your feedback on new features, and it’s time for you to enjoy the fruits of their hard work. Pivotal Application Services for Windows (PASW) 2.5 is (as always) full of new exciting things that are gonna blow your socks completely off. Let’s have a look.
The Latest Container Security and Features With Windows Server 2019
The .NET community is innovating at a remarkable pace. What’s great about your partnership with Pivotal is you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all the improvements. We combine all the “modern things” in our products, and make them available to you as a simple deployable package.
To wit: PAS for Windows now bundles Windows Server 2019. In the past few PASW releases, it may feel like Windows stemcells have been changing quite a bit – and you’re right. That’s because Microsoft continues to improve containerization in the OS. It only makes sense for PAS to take advantage of this.
Windows Server 2019 is the next iteration of Microsoft’s container journey, and it’s packed with awesome tech. A few of our favorites: additional security with Software Defined Networking and support for Kubernetes. Windows Server 2019 is the best OS yet, and we’re very excited about all the things it can help you do with cloud-native .NET!
Custom Root Certificates For Windows Containers
Windows Server comes preloaded with well-known certificate authorities(CA) in the root store. When your app makes a request to a public system (over https), and that other system has a certificate authorized by a pre-loaded CA you can trust everything is safe and secure. But what about your organization’s internal CA? Those certificates are not pre-loaded. Now you can.
SMB Services Can Now Use Fully Qualified Domain Names
Recently, we published a blog post about using the Steeltoe Framework to consume an SMB (Windows) network share. You may have noticed the line “At this time, machine names or FQDN are not supported.” Happily, we now support these scenarios!
The .NET Developer Experience team at Pivotal did a bit of extra work, on the heels of an update to Windows Server 1803.
.NET Core Containers on Windows Can Now Use The Multi-Buildpack Feature
For .NET Framework apps, the Hosted Web Core (HWC) buildpack is the perfect option. For .NET Core apps on Linux, the dotnet_core buildpack is an obvious choice.
There’s a third choice you can consider: the binary buildpack enables a .NET Core app to be a Windows container.
A feature that HWC has but the binary buildpack did not previously share, was using multiple buildpacks while pushing an app. When would you use this capability? Glad you asked!
Let's say you have a .NET core app that needs to be monitored by a third party APM. That monitoring is in the form of an agent process. Traditionally, the agent would be installed directly on the host running your app. But within a Windows container that same app has a limited relationship with the host. With multi-buildpacks you can first deploy the APM’s agent (as its own process) in the container and then deploy your app (also as its own process) in the container. The two can live in modern harmony while staying compatible with traditional systems.
Windows Stemcells and Now Available in Amazon Web Services China
You asked for it and we heard. Organizations in China love running our platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS).So we paired with AWS China to deliver Windows stemcells for this region. An added bonus: the stemcell works with PASW 2.5 as well as v2.4 and v2.3!
Now our customers using AWS IaaS in China can enjoy cloud-native .NET.
PASW 2012R2 End Of Availability
As a tear runs down my cheek, we say a bittersweet goodbye to the availability of the Windows Server 2012 R2 stemcell. We will continue to support the stemcell through September 31 2019, but the stemcell will not be available for new deployments.
The Windows Server 2012 R2 stemcell is succeeded by the rich container features Microsoft has made available starting in Windows Server, version 1709 (PASW 2.1,2.2) and Windows Server, version 1803 (PASW 2.3,2.4), and now currently in Windows Server 2019 (PASW 2.5). Windows Server 2012 R2 was the first operating system Pivotal offered BOSH managed .NET containerization as an option, and it holds a special place in our hearts. But as technology goes – we grow, we modernize, and we move on.
Thank you Windows Server 2012 R2 and farewell.
Get Started
Ready to try out these new features? Head on over to Pivotal Web Services and create a free account. This will give you access to a fully productionized current version of the Cloud Foundry platform. Grab the sample apps in the Steeltoe Github Samples repo along with the docs on the Steeltoe site, and you are off to the races.
Want to learn more about cloud-native .NET? Read Richard Seroter’s e-book on modernizing .NET applications.
