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 Microsoft Patch Tuesday

In the Microsoft ecosystem, Patch Tuesday is an unofficial name, which was created because Microsoft releases patches on the second Tuesday of each month, and critical security patches are released as out-of-band patches. Despite the name, you should rely on more than Patch Tuesday. Instead, you should install the RSS feed from the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) to get daily information about Microsoft products’ vulnerabilities and patches.

Aside from security patches, it is essential to also keep an eye on the new features and improvements released every month for Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2020. Microsoft consistently releases new features and improvements for Windows containers, and these are installed monthly on the Amazon-optimized Windows Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. However, AWS doesn’t release any technical bulletin of what updates were installed on the AMI. Therefore...