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

The idea behind ephemeral hosts

As a Windows sysadmin, never in my life would I imagine having an ephemeral (i.e., “lasting for a very short time,” according to the Oxford dictionary) or temporary Windows host in a production environment; the use case just isn’t there. Usually, Windows Servers are used to host long-running applications, where the hosts become aged after 4 or 5 years, or even more. Thousands of patches are applied, troubleshooting and hardening occur, and these sometimes help achieve years of uptime without a single reboot. This technique has been working for many years, but there is no place for this type of strategy in a Windows container world.

In the container world, containers are immutable, and hosts are ephemeral. That means the host doesn’t carry an application dependency or installation; it is just the container runtime and some additional agents for security if needed. If the server goes down, there is no dependency associated...