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

Setting up the VPC CNI plugin for Windows support

In order to enable Windows-based node support on Amazon EKS, two Kubernetes controllers are required to successfully route Windows pod network traffic through Amazon VPC using Amazon VPC CNI:

  • The VPC admission controller is responsible for creating and integrating AWS VPC resources on Kubernetes
  • The VPC resource controller is responsible for enabling Windows IP address management (IPAM) and instructing kube-proxy to create and maintain network rules from Windows pods all the way up to the VPC

In the past, customers enabled Windows support by deploying the VPC admission controller and VPC resource controller on the data plane, on top of a Linux node group in the kube-system namespace. The problem that came along with that approach was that not much AWS documentation was around on how to properly set up high-availability or troubleshoot such critical controllers. Well, AWS moved on and, in 2022, made life easier, by...