RFE: Native windows containers support on windows

[isanych]

/kind feature

Description

Currently podman running only linux containers. Windows containers are younger than linux ones and less widespread, but they do exists and growing in popularity. As Docker Desktop is not free for companies anymore and there is no official way to install Docker CE on windows there is increasing need in a free container tools for windows.
Microsoft will stop support of Docker EE in September 2022, so not only Windows client but Windows server will loose free container tools too.

To be clear, I'm talking about windows containers like mcr.microsoft.com/windows/server:ltsc2022 running on windows without any virtualization involved (like docker run --isolation=process does).
This is not a duplicate of #8136 which wants to run windows containers on linux
This is not a duplicate of podman-desktop/podman-desktop#158 which wants to run linux containers on windows

I understand that it is a huge undertaking, but I think it is a good time to have docker alternative on windows.

[rhatdan]

This would be all about contributors. The core team are all Linux. So need windows experts to make this happen.

[gbraad]

So far, Microsoft themselves have been focusing on utilizing Docker Desktop to enable Windows containers (and no indication this will change). Although, some work has been done by the community to use containerd https://www.jamessturtevant.com/posts/Windows-Containers-on-Windows-10-without-Docker-using-Containerd/ More about the internals to enable this can be found in this blog article: https://poweruser.blog/hands-on-windows-container-internals-c9782d0115ff (note: this also refers to the APIs for Host Compute Service and Host Network Service, and the Golang bindings)

[gbraad]

One of the first actions would be to allow eg. skopeo to run on windows and download the container images, and use wclayer to create the needed sandbox.vhdx to run with runhcs. This would have to be broken down in several steps among the tools in question.

[isanych]

There is windows support work in progress in nerdctl
containerd/nerdctl#184
containerd/nerdctl#197
But nerdctl stated goal does not inspire to use it in production.
And Microsoft will stop support of Docker EE in September 2022, so not only Windows client but Windows server will loose free container engine too.

[rhatdan]

This requires community to build. Not likely a bunch of Linux engineers from Red Hat are going to work on it.

[github-actions]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[github-actions]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[slonopotamus]

not only Windows client but Windows server will loose free container tools too

You might want to take a look at Stevedore project as a way to install modern Docker engine for Windows containers on both Windows Server/Client.

[gbraad]

@slonopotamus It seems stevedore is a recompile/repackaging of the Docker tools on Windows. What would it take to enable Windows containers to be used with podman natively?