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 log forwarding

Log forwarding is a mechanism where logs are forwarded from their source to another repository to be analyzed further. It is common to see customers using centralized logging solutions on-premise and/or in the cloud. AWS offers Amazon CloudWatch, a complete monitoring and logging suite, a highly available and managed service that you can use to collect and visualize logs, metrics, and events in real time from different sources. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is the solution in the suite that offers centralized logging capabilities, and it is mainly composed of two components:

  • Log stream: This is a sequence of log events that share the same source, for instance, a collection of Windows containers that runs the same application.
  • Log group: This is a log stream collection that shares the same retention, monitoring, and access control settings.

Figure 11.3 shows an example of Application XYZ comprising different services, such as IIS, NGINX, and Windows...