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

Why custom AMIs

As already discussed in previous chapters, AWS provides optimized AMIs for each container orchestrator: the ECS-optimized Windows AMI and EKS-optimized Windows AMI. These are vanilla Windows installations with the required components to work with Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS clusters.

Every month, AWS launches a new AMI set that contains the latest Windows patches and components updates, such as the following:

  • ECS-optimized Windows AMI:
    • Windows patches
    • ECS agent
    • Docker Community Edition (CE) updates
  • EKS-optimized Windows AMI:
    • AWS IAM Authenticator
    • Windows patches
    • kubelet
    • kube-proxy
    • containerd
    • csi-proxy

Usually, in a production environment, you won’t rely on the AWS patch calendar if a strict security policy requires any new security patch to be applied within 24–48 hours of its release, and updating existing hosts becomes a challenge when the group of hosts is managed by an Auto Scaling group, meaning that new hosts will be launched and terminated...