Thank you for purchasing Getting Started with Nano Server. The book you are holding is the result of 15 years of experience in the IT world and over 17 years of Windows Server experience that started with Windows Server 2000, moved on to Windows Server 2012 R2 and now, includes Windows Server 2016 and Nano Server. Modern data centers need a highly optimized server platform to run infrastructure services, distributed cloud-based applications, and containers apps based on the microservice architecture.

Nano Server is the first operating system released by Microsoft that was designed to deploy less on your servers, have less that you have to patch and reboot, and have fewer components that you actually need on your servers. Nano Server is a much scale down version of Windows Server that was built for higher density and more efficient OS resource utilization. Now moving to the cloud journey with Microsoft Azure, large server installations that have a lot of things installed require patching and rebooting, which interrupts service delivery. Nano Server is a deep refactoring initially focused on the CloudOS infrastructure and born-in-the-cloud applications; these applications were written with cloud patterns that allow you to run on top of Nano Server, and most importantly, highly optimized base OS images for Nano containers, so you can create containerized applications that are much smaller, more manageable, and easily shareable across different environments.

Our aim in this book is to provide you with the information you need to be immediately effective in deploying, managing, and administering Nano Server environments.

We hope that you get as much from reading this book as we did from writing it. Please be sure to post any questions, comments, or suggestions you may have about the book on the online author forum. Your feedback is important to us, in order to develop the best books possible in the future.