Book Image

Running Windows Containers on AWS

By : Marcio Morales
Book Image

Running Windows Containers on AWS

By: Marcio Morales

Overview of this book

Windows applications are everywhere, from basic intranet applications to high-traffic public APIs. Their prevalence underscores the importance of combining the same tools and experience for managing a modern containerized application with existing critical Windows applications to reduce costs, achieve outstanding operational excellence, and modernize quickly. This comprehensive guide to running and managing Windows containers on AWS looks at the best practices from years of customer interactions to help you stay ahead of the curve. Starting with Windows containers basics, you’ll learn about the architecture design that powers Amazon ECS, EKS, and AWS Fargate for Windows containers. With the help of examples and best practices, you’ll explore in depth how to successfully run and manage Amazon ECS, EKS, and AWS Fargate clusters with Windows containers support. Next, the book covers day 2 operations in detail, from logging and monitoring to using ancillary AWS tools that fully containerize existing legacy .NET Framework applications into containers without any code changes. The book also covers the most common Windows container operations, such as image lifecycle and working with ephemeral hosts. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered how to run Windows containers on AWS and be ready to start your modernization journey confidently.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Why Windows Containers on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
4
Part 2: Windows Containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
9
Part 3: Windows Containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
14
Part 4: Operationalizing Windows Containers on AWS

Amazon EKS and Windows support

When planning to have a heterogenous Amazon EKS cluster, it is imperative to understand what limitations are applied to Windows-based nodes and how that would affect your Amazon EKS cluster.

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is customers first adding Windows-based node groups in their Amazon EKS cluster for the next plan on what to do regarding logging, monitoring, security, patching, and EKS limitations. This mistake usually costs lots of money and hours for customers paying hourly rates to consult companies to implement these projects. All these should be planned ahead of time, identifying commercial or open source tools that will address your requirements.

I will discuss some of the most common solutions that don’t fit on Windows-based node groups right from the shelf, which will require additional development to get up and running:

  • Karpenter: Not available for Windows-based nodes. If you need to use a tool that...