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

Speeding up a Windows container startup time

What if we could have a solution for all the problems mentioned previously so that the Windows container startup could avoid all these operations happening under the hood during the EC2 Windows container host initialization?

Here is where a container image cache strategy comes into play, and all we want is to create a custom AMI that already has all these container layers downloaded and extracted before joining the Amazon ECS or EKS cluster, so when the EC2 Windows container host joins the cluster, the container orchestrator will schedule the container. All the previously mentioned problems won’t happen since the container runtime will check whether the image is already present locally. If so, it will just check the container image metadata and run the container.

Extending EC2 Image Builder with custom components

In Chapter 13, Working with Ephemeral Hosts, we dove deep into how EC2 Image Builder allows us to build custom...