With the advent of Windows containers and SQL Server on Linux, the options for running SQL Server are growing. 


Should you run SQL Server on physical machines, virtualised, in the cloud or do you get with the cool kids and run it on Docker?


Docker is great for development, testing and stateless apps, but would you run your production SQL Server on it?


It may sound crazy to run your data tier in ephemeral containers, but I'll discuss the reasons why this might be a good idea if we can figure out the following challenges:


Data persistence
Security
High Availability
Licensing
Monitoring
Deploying SQL Server updates


Microsoft themselves have said they expect containerisation of applications to become as common as virtualisation. If this happens then containers are something we all need to understand.