Running containers on Windows has never been as easy as it should be. While there are versions of Docker Desktop and Podman that work with both the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Hyper-V, I’ve found both overly complex and unstable. Where they have worked, it’s turned out that Hyper-V has been the best option, using a Linux virtual machine to host my containers. That all adds up to overhead, layers of virtual infrastructure that get in the way of work and that need to be rebuilt every time I restart my PC.

Part of the problem is WSL. It’s a good tool, but WSL2’s file-system integration is slow, and you’re left having to work with code using Visual Studio Code’s remote integration, which means putting a VS Code Server in every container you’re building and testing. If you’re working with Kubernetes, that’s even more complexity that needs to be managed, dragging you away from code.

I ended up running most of my container testing and development from a separate machine, a Linux server running containerd. But though it worked (and had all the resources of workstation-class device), it wasn’t portable, and for some reason I’ve yet to uncover, Ubuntu’s remote desktop access doesn’t work for me.

So, it was good to see Microsoft make several announcements around WSL at Build 2026 as part of a push to make Windows a developer platform again. The first, an improved WSL3, is still some way away, but the second, WSL-native container support, shipped at the end of June. It is already seeing community-driven development of Docker Desktop-like tooling to help monitor and manage your containers.

Delivering a WSL-based container platform fits in with the other developer-focused Windows announcements at Build. Making Windows behave more like Linux is Microsoft responding to developer needs, given that more than 50% of servers on Azure run a Linux distribution. Linux is the basis of cloud-native infrastructure, so developers need to be able to build on it wherever they are.

Getting started with WSL container

WSL container provides a new CLI that works in parallel to the familiar WSL, with commands to support the entire container life cycle, from creation to shut down. All you need to do to get started is upgrade your WSL installation to the current pre-release build (at the time of writing this was 2.9.3). Simply open an administrator PowerShell terminal and enter wsl --update --pre-release.

This downloads and installs the latest WSL release. Once you’ve closed and re-opened your terminal (to ensure that you’ve updated its context) you can check that WSLC has installed by entering wslc, which should list the available commands. The new CLI is aliased to WSL container, if you prefer to keep your container work separate from WSL (and avoid typos that might accidentally affect your WSL installations).

Under the hood Microsoft is using WSL container to trial new integration points for Linux in Windows. One key change is the use of a new file system that significantly speeds up access to Windows from inside a container. Another improvement gives WSL container a new networking mode that relays networking connections directly through the Windows network stack, ensuring it has access to the same resources and security as Windows.

Calling Linux containers from Windows applications

Things get more interesting when you start to use the WSL container API from inside your Windows code. Here you can include calls to Linux containers inside your desktop applications, taking advantage of existing services, building and deploying containers from inside your CI/CD pipeline. Using the new file system and networking stack helps reduce the friction that comes with crossing the boundaries between the two platforms.

The WSL container API is available as a NuGet package, with support for C, C#, and C++. It allows your code to start and stop containers, and interact directly with them, sending command-line calls and reading back responses. Where things get interesting is being able to launch a containerized service from your code, exposing its REST or gRPC APIs on a local network port. Microsoft has provided sample code to show you what’s possible at this early stage.

Microsoft is doing something revolutionary here. It’s taking the cloud-native, service-driven model and bringing it into Windows and using it to bridge decades of divergent development. You no longer have to rewrite a service that works on Linux to run in Windows; all you need to do is containerize the service and launch it from the WSL container API. When you’re done, the API will tidy up after you, shutting down the container and reclaiming the memory it used.

It’s important to remember that this is only the first public preview of a rapidly developing platform. There are many opportunities here to, say, build on the syscall translation layer developed for WSL1 to produce a native Windows-to-Linux application integration stack that removes the overhead of using web-based service calls. It will be interesting to see what develops, but this first release is very interesting indeed.

Manage Linux containers from Windows

If you want a Docker Desktop-like experience for building and testing containers on Windows developer hardware, you may not have long to wait. WSL container’s underlying API is already being used to build tools that manage and monitor containers for you. One such tool is the WSL Container Desktop, under development on GitHub. While there aren’t any release builds yet, it’s easy enough to compile and get running by cloning the source repository and building using the .NET CLI. You do need to have the Windows App SDK installed, and some features require access to the Azure CLI.

WSL Container Desktop is built in C#, with a WinUI front end. It’s currently only verified for use on x64, though I was able to compile and run it on an Arm64 PC and use it to test and run containers. Once running, it gives you a well-designed front end for your WSL-hosted containers, showing what’s running and what resources they are using. You can link WSL Container Desktop to container registries, like Docker’s and Azure’s, so you can quickly pull base containers and then use the WSL container environment to add your own code and customizations.

Your main interaction point is the WSL Container Desktop dashboard, which shows what containers are running and their current resource usage. Elements are displayed in cards, taking a cue from Windows’ own user interface and especially from its Settings app. From the dashboard, you can drill down into the available containers, with quick start, stop, and reload options, as well as an extended memory that includes the ability to open a web browser to the appropriate port. I tested this with a container that included an entire KDE webtop, giving me a Linux distro running in a container in my browser.

Other options include a details view that displays current logs and provides tools for inspecting the state of a container. This is the type of tool that comes in useful when debugging and testing container applications, as it can provide insights that the WSL container CLI doesn’t offer. Another option helps you clean up after you’ve downloaded an image and don’t need it anymore, with analytics that show the largest images and images you haven’t used for some time. On top of its tooling for working with WSL containers, WSL Container Desktop provides a basic settings tool that helps you configure its look and feel, as well as how it integrates with Windows.

Run Kubernetes inside Windows for cloud-native development

One of the more useful features of WSL Container Desktop is the ability to quickly stand up a K3s Kubernetes instance in WSL that can be used to host WSL containers, providing a local environment to build and test cloud-native applications wherever you might be. The K3s tooling offers a similar experience to the Kubernetes project’s own Headlamp UI, making it easy to go between your development environment and a production Kubernetes cluster.

It’s fair to describe WSL container as one of those Windows features you didn’t think you needed, but now it’s here you can’t live without it. WSL container simplifies building a container development tool chain in Windows, and at the same time allows you to think about a new generation of hybrid applications that take advantage of decades of development in both Windows and Linux.

The result is something that was unimaginable a few years ago: dropping a Linux container into the middle of a Windows application and treating it as another local service. As the WSL container platform evolves, you should expect to see more ways of bringing Linux and Windows together, using containers to deliver a hybrid platform that gives us the best of both worlds at long last.

For a decade, Kubernetes was the right answer. It organized containers, scaled services horizontally and gave platform teams a shared vocabulary for running software in production. It abstracted away enough of the underlying complexity that engineers could stop thinking about servers and start thinking about services. Most cloud-native infrastructure today is built on top of it, directly or in spirit, and EKS made that model the default for the majority of enterprise teams running workloads on AWS.

The workload that defined that era was the stateless HTTP request, fast in, fast out, disposable. A user action triggers a request, the request hits a service, the service returns a response and the container is done. Kubernetes was optimized for that pattern down to the scheduler internals: Bin-pack containers onto nodes, autoscale on CPU and memory, evict and reschedule when something goes wrong. The whole system is tuned around the assumption that individual units of work are short, stateless and interchangeable.

That assumption no longer holds for the workloads that matter most right now.

The agent workload is structurally different

Agents are long-running, stateful processes. They reason across time, call external tools, spawn subprocesses, write and execute code, and make decisions that depend on what happened five steps earlier in the same task. A single-agent workflow might run for minutes or hours, touching a dozen external systems and generating intermediate outputs that subsequent steps depend on. The compute layer for that kind of work needs to do things the old model was never asked to do. That is the new pattern: Execution infrastructure designed around agent semantics rather than request semantics.

The Kubernetes community itself has acknowledged this mismatch. In March 2026, Kubernetes SIG Apps published an introduction to Agent Sandbox, a new CRD-based abstraction designed specifically for singleton, stateful agent workloads. The framing is direct: The ecosystem is moving from short-lived, isolated tasks to deploying multiple, coordinated AI agents that run continuously, and mapping those workloads to traditional Kubernetes primitives requires an entirely new abstraction. The fact that the Kubernetes maintainers built a dedicated primitive for this, rather than recommending teams compose one from existing resources, is itself the clearest signal that agent execution does not fit the old model.

What agent execution actually requires

Concretely, it requires four things. First, isolated execution environments that provision in milliseconds, not minutes, so each agent task gets its own sandbox for code execution and tool calls without blocking the reasoning loop. The difference between a two-second environment and a two-minute environment is not a performance optimization; it determines whether the architecture is viable at all. Second, durable state management across the full task lifecycle, so an agent can pause, hand off or resume without re-initializing from scratch and burning tokens to reconstruct context it already built. Third, coordination primitives for multi-agent work: The ability to spawn subagents, pass structured outputs between them and track task dependencies across a graph of concurrent processes. Production agent systems are rarely single agents; they are pipelines of specialized agents with handoffs that need to be reliable and inspectable. Fourth, credentials and secrets management that travel with the execution context, so agents can authenticate to external services securely without exposing credentials in the task definition, logs or the environment variables of a shared container.

The mismatch shows up fast in production

Kubernetes and EKS expose the mismatch quickly in practice. Pod eviction terminates an agent mid-task with no clean recovery path. Autoscaling reads CPU utilization as the load signal, but an agent holding a long inference connection looks idle to the scheduler even when it is doing the most consequential work in the pipeline. Provisioning a new environment takes 45 seconds to two minutes on a well-tuned cluster; agent workloads need that in under two seconds or the reasoning loop stalls and the user experience degrades visibly. These are not edge cases or misconfigurations. They are the normal operating conditions for production agent workloads running on infrastructure that was not designed for them.

The utilization data makes the broader cost picture even starker. The 2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report from CAST AI, drawn from analysis of over 23,000 production clusters across AWS, Azure and GCP, found average CPU utilization at 8 percent, down from 10 percent the year prior. Memory utilization fell from 23 to 20 percent. CPU overprovisioning jumped from 40 to 69 percent year over year. These numbers reflect clusters running traditional workloads, and the pattern is worsening, not improving, as environments scale. Agent workloads compound this problem further. An agent holding an open inference connection or waiting on a tool call registers as idle to a scheduler that reads CPU and memory as the only meaningful load signals. The infrastructure responds to the wrong metric, overprovisioning capacity for demand it cannot measure, while the actual bottleneck, environment provisioning latency and state continuity, goes unaddressed.

Security is not the same problem it was before

Agent workloads change the threat model at the infrastructure level. A compromised stateless service exposes a narrow surface defined by its API contracts. A compromised agent exposes every system it can reach, every credential it holds and every action it is authorized to take on behalf of the user. Agents generate and execute their own code, make non-deterministic tool-call decisions and accumulate context across long-running sessions. Standard container namespacing does not contain that kind of risk. Kernel-level isolation, default-deny network egress, scoped credentials per session and agent-aware observability are not optional hardening steps. They are baseline requirements for running agents in production.

What teams that ship agents have already figured out

Some of the clearest evidence for this shift comes not from infrastructure vendors but from product engineering teams running agents at scale on their own code. In late 2025, Ramp’s engineering team published a detailed account of building Inspect, their internal background coding agent. Each Inspect session runs in a sandboxed VM with a full-stack development environment and deep integrations across their observability, CI, and deployment tooling. The architecture requirements map almost exactly to the four primitives above. Filesystem snapshots keep sessions starting in seconds rather than minutes. Sessions are isolated and stateful. The agent can run tests, review telemetry, query feature flags and visually verify frontend changes in a real browser. And the whole system supports unlimited concurrency, so engineers can spin up ten parallel sessions exploring different approaches to the same problem without contention.

The results speak for themselves. Within months of launch, roughly 30 percent of all pull requests merged to Ramp’s frontend and backend repositories were written by Inspect. That level of adoption was not mandated. It happened because the execution environment was fast enough, capable enough and well-integrated enough that the agent was strictly better than a local workflow for a meaningful share of tasks. The key insight from the Ramp case is not about the model. It is about the execution layer. As their team put it, session speed should only be limited by model-provider time-to-first-token; everything else, like cloning and installing, needs to be done before the session starts. That is a statement about infrastructure, not intelligence.

The ecosystem is catching up, but defaults are sticky

None of that is a criticism of the tools. Kubernetes solved exactly the problem it was designed for, and it solved it well. The issue is that infrastructure defaults are sticky. Teams inherit them, build on top of them and optimize within their constraints long after the underlying workload has changed. The Kubernetes community’s own response, the Agent Sandbox project under SIG Apps, validates the thesis that a new abstraction is necessary. The new primitives the community is building include warm pools for near-zero cold starts, lifecycle management for suspending and resuming idle agents without losing state, and pluggable kernel isolation for secure execution of untrusted code. These are not incremental improvements to existing resources. They are net-new abstractions that acknowledge the old model does not stretch to fit.

But adoption of purpose-built agent infrastructure remains early. Enterprises building agent pipelines today are largely running a request-oriented orchestration model against an execution-oriented workload, and the mismatch shows up in task failure rates, runaway costs and debugging cycles that have no good tooling because the observability layer was also designed for stateless services.

The structural advantage is available now

The infrastructure to close that gap exists now. The prerequisite is recognizing that agent execution is a first-class compute pattern with its own primitives and its own requirements, not a variant of the stateless service model that defined the last decade. Teams that make that shift early will have a meaningful structural advantage. The ones that do not will spend the next two years wondering why their agent systems are unreliable at a scale that should be tractable.

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