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-optimized Windows AMIs

AWS provides customers with Amazon EKS-optimized Windows AMIs, which are preconfigured with the necessary components such as Docker Engine, Kubelet, and Containerd to run Windows containers as pods successfully.

There are four Amazon EKS-optimized Windows AMI variants:

  • Amazon EKS-optimized Windows Server 2022 Full AMI
  • Amazon EKS-optimized Windows Server 2022 Core AMI
  • Amazon EKS-optimized Windows Server 2019 Full AMI
  • Amazon EKS-optimized Windows Server 2019 Core AMI

In Chapter 4, Deploying a Windows Container Instance, we dove deep into the differences between the Full and Core variants.

The Amazon EKS-optimized AMI has the following components included:

  • kubelet is a node agent that runs on each node. Its main responsibility is to register the node with the cluster's API Server and ensures pods specified on PodSpec are running and in a healthy state.
  • kube-proxy is a network proxy that runs on each node...