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

Understanding the EKS Windows bootstrap

When you launch a Windows node, there is a Start-EKSBootstrap.ps1 on the AMI that is responsible for bootstrapping the Windows node with the appropriate kubelet configuration.

There are some required and optional parameters that need to be set when bootstrapping using Terraform. First, let’s understand what the available parameters are:

  • -EKSClusterName: Specifies the Amazon EKS cluster name for this worker node to join.
  • -KubeletExtraArgs: Specifies extra arguments for kubelet (optional).
  • -KubeProxyExtraArgs: Specifies extra arguments for kube-proxy (optional).
  • -APIServerEndpoint: Specifies the Amazon EKS cluster API server endpoint (optional). Only valid when used with -Base64ClusterCA.
  • -Base64ClusterCA: Specifies the base64-encoded cluster Certificate Authority (CA) content (optional). Only valid when used with -APIServerEndpoint.
  • -DNSClusterIP: Overrides the IP address to use for Domain Name Server (DNS...