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

Implementing LogMonitor

Unlike Linux, the Windows operating system (OS) uses Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and event logs as log outputs:

  • ETW: This is a kernel-level tracing that allows you to log kernel and application events to a log file.
  • Event logs: These logs stores application and Windows service logs in a file that can be consumed by different sources as well as by Event Viewer.

The same happens at the Windows container level. By default, all logs generated are locally stored as a file and are available to be consumed using Event Viewer:

Figure 11.1 – Windows OS log destination

Figure 11.1 – Windows OS log destination

However, container runtimes such as Docker or log processors such as Fluent Bit or Fluentd fetch containers logs from the default Linux STDOUT. STDOUT is a data stream used by command line programs to output values, logs, and so on. As a result, logs from a Windows container aren’t available to the container runtime.

Do you want to test...