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Category: Containers

First Thoughts on Rancher Desktop

Published 2025-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones tries something new:

I’ve been very happy with Docker Desktop for years, running it on both laptop and desktop. However, a corporate decision was made to move to Rancher Desktop, so I now have an unexpected “opportunity” to learn something new.

Here’s a short post on how things went on the desktop and laptop.

I’m guessing corporate made the switch because of Docker for Desktop’s licensing costs. It is kind of funny how, in the Windows and even MacOS world, “Docker” is synonymous with “container,” whereas in the Linux world, that’s not at all the case.

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Creating a SQL Server 2025 Container

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea tries out SQL Server 2025:

This post covers creating SQL Server 2025 containers in Podman, Qnap Container Station, and sqlcmd, and restoring a sample database to test the new version.

One important thing to remember is that all SQL Server 2025 containers are based on the Linux build of SQL Server. For 90% of tasks (give or take), that won’t matter, and you’ll still have a good time trying out the new version of SQL Server and make sure things still work in your databases the way you expect them to. But some functionality (e.g., merge replication) is not available in Linux and other functionality (like PolyBase or Machine Learning Services) has a very different installation process.

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Online Vertical Scaling of SQL Server in Kubernetes

Published 2025-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski controls the horizontal. Andrew Pruski controls the vertical:

One of the new features in Kubernetes v1.33 is the ability to resize CPU and memory resources for containers online, aka without having to recreate the pod the container is running in. In the past, when adjusting a pod’s resources, Kubernetes would delete the existing pod and create a new one via a controller.

Not a problem for applications that can have multiple replicas running, but for SQL Server this would cause a disruption as we (generally) only have one pod running SQL Server in a statefulset. Let’s see this in action.

Click through to see an example of normal behavior, followed by how it differs in the latest version of Kubernetes.

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The Overhead Cost of Kubernetes

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shares some thoughts:

A report of cloud Kubernetes usage shows that these resources are being under-utiliized, over-provisioned, and costing more than necessary for many organizations. From the previous year, average CPU declined from 13% to 10%, and memory is used at only around 23%. Companies are over-provisioning their clusters, which is understandable. No one wants to have systems overloaded and users complaining about performance.

Steve goes on to list some of the challenges of running an orchestrator like Kubernetes (or OpenShift or whatever). There’s a lot of code and process behind them, and that can be challenging if you don’t have administrators who know what they’re doing. Even hosting in Azure Kubernetes Service or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service only removes some of the systems management pain. That said, there is a certain level of comfort in knowing that my applications will automatically restart if a problem occurs, so the pain is usually worth it.

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Cleaning up Azure Container Registries

Published 2025-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret does a bit of cleanup work:

Azure Container Registries can easily become cluttered with many versions of images. Did you know that each ACR sku comes with a certain amount of storage included, and when you go over that, you’ll pay overage charges. Let’s look at how to check your current storage, keep your registry nice and tidy with an ACR clean-up task, and monitor the storage levels so you’ll never pay extra again!

It’s easy to run up the disk space usage with a container registry, especially if you have automated builds running.

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Testing a SQL Server Operation with a Container

Published 2025-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret performs a test:

Today, my colleague wanted to quickly test out some dbatools commands to install the Ola Hallengren maintenance solution. They had a local instance of SQL installed, but it already had the maintenance jobs running, so it wasn’t a fresh, out of the box instance.

So let’s spin a SQL Server instance in seconds to test against! (Ok it’s seconds if you have the pre-requisites installed, but I’ll get you setup in a few minutes if not)!

Click through for a primer on using SQL Server in a container.

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Visualizing a SQL Server Kubernetes Statefulset

Published 2025-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski builds a diagram:

The other day I came across an interesting repo on github, KubeDiagrams.

What this repo does is generate Kubernetes architecture diagrams from Kubernetes manifest files…nice!

Deploying applications to Kubernetes can get complicated fast…especially with stateful applications such as SQL Server.

So having the ability to easily generate diagrams is really helpful…because we all should be documenting everything, right?

Click through for instructions and a couple of gotchas Andrew ran into along the way.

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SQL Server Availability Groups in Docker Containers

Published 2025-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Yvonne Vanslageren builds a high availability solution for containerized SQL Server instances:

For enterprise SQL Server DBAs, high availability is essential for maintaining seamless database operations—particularly in scenarios involving Change Data Capture (CDC) or other mission-critical functionalities. Docker containers can streamline the setup and management of development or testing environments for Always On Availability Groups (AOAG). By bundling configuration files, scripts, and dependencies into containers, teams gain a reproducible, portable, and efficient deployment mechanism.

This guide explains how to build an Always On environment inside Docker containers using Docker Desktop, Docker Compose, and a series of setup scripts. It walks through the creation of two containers (primary and secondary) configured in a clusterless Always On Availability Group scenario.

Click through for the process.

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Comparing Azure Kubernetes Service and Container Apps

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gaurav Shukla makes a comparison:

Hello Readers!! Welcome to the new blog!! AKS vs ACA, which is best in cloud migration? When migrating an application to the cloud, choosing the right platform is crucial to ensure scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of management. Two of the prominent services offered by Azure for running containerized applications are Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Apps (ACA). Both are excellent choices, but their use cases, complexity, and operational overhead differ significantly. This blog will provide a detailed comparison of AKS and ACA, helping you decide which is the best approach for your cloud migration.

Read on for an overview of each service and a nice table outlining the differences.

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