Container virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology that can simplify how you deploy and manage distributed applications. When people discuss containers, they usually mean Linux-based containers. This makes sense, because native Linux kernel features like cgroups introduced the idea of resource isolation, eventually leading to containers as we know them today.
For a long time, you could only containerize Linux processes, but Microsoft introduced support for Windows-based containers in Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. With this, you can now take an existing Windows application, containerize it using Docker, and run it as an isolated container on Windows. Microsoft supports two flavors of Windows containers: Windows Server and Hyper-V. You can build Windows containers on either the microsoft/windowsservercore and microsoft/nanoserver base images. You can read more about Windows containers in the Microsoft Windows containers documentation.