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

Working with persistent storage using CSI drivers

In Chapter 5, Deploying an EC2 Windows-Based Task, in the Setting up persistent storage section, we discussed the persistent storage use cases for Windows containers using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon EBS. The use case remains the same; the only difference is how each container orchestrator manages the storage life cycle.

Kubernetes uses the Container Storage Interface (CSI), a standard for exposing arbitrary block and file storage systems to containerized workloads. There are two open source CSI drivers with Windows supportability:

  • Amazon EBS CSI driver: An open source project developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows Amazon EKS clusters to manage the life cycle of Amazon EBS volumes for persistent volumes
  • SMB CSI driver for Kubernetes: Developed by the open source community, it allows Kubernetes to manage the life cycle of Server Message Block (SMB) shares for persistent volumes

In...