Two weeks postpartum and things have settled at home. A little bit tired, but otherwise life is good- and baby Loke is just wonderful. I’ll be on maternity leave until May, working part time from home and finishing some book projects with Loke by my side.
Writing this post with one hand as Loke wants to be close 😀
For this Stupid Question Loke is joining me, and he will be joining me for future videos as well.
Todays question is: What is Windows Sandbox?
Windows Sandbox was announced just a few days ago, and it’s a desktop environment for running untrusted applications in isolation. It’s available from Insiders Build 18305, for Windows Pro or Enterprise (to check your build version run [Environment]::OSVersion.Version in Powershell).
Read more about features in build 18305, including Windows Sandbox here
The Sandbox concept is one that has been around for quite a while, and its basically a way to run applications in isolation, with limited access to resources and with a specific set of rules, and run in a disposable manner (nothing is persisted). Although Windows Sandbox uses virtualization, it’s not your standard virtual machine (nor is it a container). It does however use the Windows Containers technology (as they were built cloud-first).
This is how it differs from your standard VM and containers:
• It’s a lightweight virtual machine
• It uses a copy of your installed OS
• Images are stored compressed
• Magic memory management
• Snapshots and clones are used for faster startups