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

Dynamically scaling out Windows pods

This is a topic that I love, especially to get people to think about scaling out Windows pods. Container workloads and/or cloud-native applications are designed by default with the premise to scale as needed, which results in preparing the entire platform, such as container orchestrators, to support these demands.

My question for you is simple. Does the Windows application you plan to run on top of a container need to scale out? I bet if it is a 5- or 10-year-old application running on-premises, it doesn’t currently have any scale-out mechanism, and the application wasn’t designed to support that. So why should you care about it if your application doesn’t leverage this benefit?

Sometimes, we overthink technical requirements and assume premises that aren’t necessary, and all this is because people keep comparing Windows and Linux containers. Now, assuming that you will dynamically scale out with Windows pods, at...