Back in 2012 I was interviewed by a company named FeatherNet, which you can find here.

I would like to take a quote from this interview:

Last week I read this article which talked about a thing called ‘Nano Server’.
You may also want to take a look at a post from Mary Jo Foley about this, which you can find here.
This got me all excited and I immediately remembered the interview I did… because in a way I was theorizing about this.
But, back then I was limited by the knowledge and experiences I had. I thought that there would be App-V packages for Windows Server roles.
Boy, was I mistaken. Think about it… Microsoft is a vendor. They own the Operating System. So think long term, instead of short.
They can take years to get to a point where they want to be… Now that’s architecture at its best 🙂

If you’ve read the article I linked to, and my interview, I would like to theorize again.
Think of a world with a server footprint of only a few 100 megabytes, preferably less.
Because all the binaries for all Windows Server roles aren’t located in the installation itself, but available as a package which you can deploy, you get a deployment time which is a fraction of the time it takes right now. And let’s be honest… if you’ve ever installed Windows Server 10 on a SSD drive through a 1GB WAN or USB3 device, you’ll confirm that it’s pretty darn fast already.
Now think about a fraction of that time… Wow!

Also a great benefit is the separation of code.
Back in the old days, Windows Server was a huge monster… one big bulk of code.
These days it has become more and more modularized.
The logical next step is to take those modules out from the OS and make them stand-alone packages which you can deploy like any other package.

If you’re even a little bit in the thing called DevOps, this should make you smile and bounce on your chair from excitement 🙂