Build windows images with buildx in Kubernetes

[spyrosmouchlianitis]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently in the process of migrating my self-hosted Azure agents to AKS. Given that these agents are utilized for Docker builds, and following Microsoft's recommendation to use buildx, I opted to create a builder with the Kubernetes driver.

The builder functions correctly for Linux builds, but I encounter issues when attempting a Windows build, specifically when a RUN command is present. According to this article, running Windows builds with RUN commands is not supported. However, considering the age of the article, I'm curious if there have been any updates or resolutions to this issue?

Thank you in advance.

[jedevc]

Buildkit is working on support for windows containers: moby/buildkit#616

As far as I'm aware, RUN should work now (with some caveats)? cc @gabriel-samfira @TBBle, would it be possible to get a doc or something in buildkit that covers the current state of windows (since even I'm not 100% sure about it!)

[TBBle]

I think microsoft/Windows-Containers#34 is the better place to cover the overall state of user-facing stuff, and includes more user-facing experiments and results.

For example, simply having BuildKit working itself will not deliver buildx builder integration, or even a particularly user-friendly flow in BuildKit. (Using BuildKit directly is already relatively non-user-friendly, particularly on Windows where we don't yet have a strong packaging ecosystem delivering the dependencies.)

And to use buildx builders that rely on BuildKit in a container is something we haven't even started doing more than speculating about. Although I note that the linked article from 2022 has exercised a few of the mechanisms that we will need, which is nice.

[spyrosmouchlianitis]

Great, thanks for the insights guys! I'll try to find some alternative solutions then.