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Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

I should have made it more clear, but one need of mine (as mentioned in another comment) is a deployment system that supports the ability to manage very old, archaic, wonky systems. WinXP, Win95, etc. Do you recommend any tooling to support this?

PAASs aren't going to help me much in managing our resources like physical legacy machines. Thoughts?

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Depends on what you want to do with these machines, but for multi-OS setup you need VMs. I guess you could check out Vagrant, maybe with some AutoIT to help you avtomate tasks inside Windows. It won't be pretty, but it will work.

K8S won't support them either. K8S doesn't support Windows at all at the moment. And even when it does, it likely won't support WinXP.

To add to that, the container story for Windows is pretty dismal right now, even on Azure. I was at Microsoft Build this year, and most of the PMs gave me the impression that Windows containers were an afterthought on Azure due to lack of use -- Linux support were priority. I also did some PoCs on Windows containers both on-prem and on Azure and they were unwieldy and buggy. The microsoft/windowsservercore Docker image is also a very heavy image at 10+ GB. The microsoft/nanoserver image is smaller, but has certain limitations.

tldr; if you want to use containers, go with Linux.

If you really need XP support, VMs are your only option. Tools like Hashicorp Packer [1] may be able to help with managing machine images.

[1] https://www.packer.io/intro/index.html

i think kubevirt is being rolled in soon. It adds a VM type to the set of things k8s can manage. i'm not sure what's required inside the vm to play nice. I haven't used kubevirt at all. But it might be worth checking out.

Ah, a bit out of my experience alas. Sorry! However, I'm still not sure how container orchestration would help with this.

I can still endorse PAAS for any "cloud" applications you may want to deploy.

Yea it containers definitely won't. Though something like Nomad _(as I'm researching now)_ that tries to manage both physical machines and container fleets might fit nicely.

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