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 node groups

Let’s first start with understanding the different nomenclatures between the Kubernetes project and Amazon EKS. In the Kubernetes world, a cluster consists of worker Nodes, which are responsible for running containerized applications in the form of a Pod.

In Amazon EKS, worker nodes are called Amazon EC2 nodes, and one or more Amazon EC2 nodes that are deployed into the same Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group are called a node group.

Amazon EKS offers three node group options:

  • Managed node groups automate the provisioning and life cycle management of Amazon EC2 nodes. One of the benefits of managed mode groups is that you don’t need to care about draining nodes during node replacement, as it is handled by the AWS data plane. When this book was written, managed node groups weren’t supported for the Windows OS; however, remember that an Amazon EKS cluster with a Windows node group is a heterogenous cluster since at least one Linux...