(Not so) Stupid Question 306: What is LCOW?

I’m back from vacation and had a few updates I had to run updates on my computer. I decided to run the Docker updates as well, something I haven’t done for a long while as I haven’t been using Docker on my dev box. I was greeted by a message that informed me that LCOW containers can now be run alongside Windows containers.

Last year I spoke at DockerCon Europe and remember attending a session on Linux containers on Windows and the speaker ran both platform containers side by side. At the time it was an internal experimental feature, and now we get to play with it as well. By the way, this became available earlier this year- it’s just me being slow to share the news hehe. I believe it was first available in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and in Windows Server 1709.

LCOW is short for Linux Containers on Windows- and if you want to learn more make sure to visit the repo

You need to have the following update or greater: Docker for Windows version 18.03.0-ce-win59, and enable experimental features. According to the MS blog post you should specify the [platform when pulling a Linux Image (or if you run a container based on an image that you haven’t pulled yet).

2018-08-28_15-00-18

(Not so) Stupid Question 306: What is LCOW?

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