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 is implementing a container image cache strategy important?

The short answer is that we don’t want to wait for a Windows container to take six or more minutes to initiate and start receiving traffic. Still, it usually is more than that since a lot of concurrent I/O will be happening under the hood, and even containers that are ready to serve traffic may experience poor performance.

As we already learned in Chapter 6, Deploying a Fargate Windows-Based Task, usually, a Windows container image is composed of multiple intermediate layers, which are also big in size. In the following figure, we have a widespread scenario across Amazon ECS and EKS clusters that host Windows containers composed of an application framework diversification and sidecars containers. For this, I will use applications ABC and XYZ as samples and Fluent Bit as a log aggregator running as a sidecar container:

  • Web application based on ASP.NET Framework 3.5 called ABC
  • Web application based...