Has Drone given up on Windows containers?

Drone Support
1

Hi all!
I’ve been using Drone CI for building Windows software inside Windows containers for over 2 years. This worked well in the past when Windows 10 1809, 1903, and 1909 were still the current versions.
Nowadays, these versions are all out of support, and don’t support process isolation anymore - the central feature that makes Windows containers somewhat usable.

Nevertheless, Drone has not published any images for newer Windows versions.
Related PRs remain uncommented.
Which is why I have to ask: Has Drone given up on Windows containers altogether?

Best regards,

Colin Finck

2

Nope, we were just working on another side of windows support. We have just released the alpha of GitHub - drone-runners/drone-runner-aws: Experimental Drone runner that executes pipelines on single-use virtual machines and https://docs.drone.io/runner/aws/installation/
It has windows EC2 instance and support for docker on windows too. We are hoping that this will help a lot of our users.

There is a lot to support out there and we are trying are best, so thank you for your patience. We are looking at more support for other architectures too.

3

In the meantime, I have reverted back from --isolation=process to --isolation=hyperv. With an up to date Windows 10, this works much better than my past attempts.
It especially allows me to run Windows containers built against an older Windows kernel on a newer Windows host operating system.
This takes out the urgency of upgrading all Drone CI containers from the 1909 build to something newer.

It also feels like Docker’s Process Isolation is slowly being abandoned.
My current development machine runs on Windows 10 version 21H1 build 19043. This build has no matching Windows Server build (they are still on 19042, see also Windows Container Version Compatibility | Microsoft Docs).
With all base images only existing for Windows Server, I cannot choose any image that supports Process Isolation on my platform.