Where have the Microsoft SQL Server images for Windows containers gone?

General
1

Hi there,
I am looking for images of Microsoft SQL Server for Windows-based containers. There are references to them on the web, but any attempt to find them on the Docker Hub fails. What happened to them? Is it possible to get them somewhere?

For example this Microsoft blog posts announces the images: New Windows container images of SQL Server 2017 on Windows Server 1709! - Microsoft Tech Community

But the links to images are dead.

I was able to find the GitHub repository with docker files: GitHub - microsoft/mssql-docker: Official Microsoft repository for SQL Server in Docker resources

I still do not understand why the images are not published…

2

SQL Server Windows based container initiative was droped by MS:

Update- Beta program for SQL Server on Windows container is suspended. - Microsoft Community Hub

That is way the images are not published.

The truth is that MS was very late to the Container/Kubernetes game, so it made sense that number did not add up when trying to do things in windows containers at that time. I mean, they dropped this in June 2021, and AKS got support for windows nodes may 2019 preview and april 2020 out of preview. And it has taken time to mature it…

Even now a days using Windows containers has it’s problems (in docker desktop you cannot run windows and linux images at the same time - which you could in the past, minicube started an initiative so support windows containers late 2023…).

It made sense they focused on Linux for deliverying.

I recently had the need to support MSSQL on windows containers so my team can have development boxes with MSSQL and other windows must containers, so I built some images for this:

windowscontainers/sqlserver2022base/readme.md at master · david-garcia-garcia/windowscontainers (github.com)

We are succesfully spinning up and using stateful SQL Server for development on kubernetes kluster without issues (AKS).