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

Building a custom AMI pipeline

EC2 Image Builder is a fully managed service that provides an automated pipeline to build and keep AMIs up to date and secure for you. As you may know, maintaining Windows Server images is very time-consuming, resource intensive, and error prone as since the old days we used to keep and maintain operational system images on VMware.

Important note

EC2 Image Builder is free, and you pay only for the underlying AWS resources used to create, store, and share the images.

EC2 Image Builder uses AWS Task Orchestrator and Executor (AWSTOE). An AWS document (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/imagebuilder/latest/userguide/imagebuilder-ug.pdf) defines AWSTOE as a “standalone application that creates, validates, and runs commands within a component definition framework.” With AWSTOE, you can modify system configuration and orchestrate complex workflows without writing code. That means you can have a series of components written in YAML, which...