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

Containerizing Windows applications with AWS App2Container

I’m a big App2Container fan. The value proposition and simplicity the tool brings to you are fantastic. App2Container (A2C) allows you to remotely connect to your application server, extract binaries and configurations, and automatically build and deploy the application as a Windows container on Amazon ECS, EKS, or AWS Fargate.

App2Container is a command-line interface tool that is available for free from AWS, and you only pay for the deployed AWS resources. The process from extraction to deploying a container is a set of command lines we will cover in this section, but before that, let’s understand the A2C workflow.

In the following figure, we have a detailed workflow on how A2C connects, extracts, and deploys Windows applications as containers:

Figure 15.2 – A2C workflow

Figure 15.2 – A2C workflow

Only six instructions must be executed from the command line in the A2C Worker machine to generate...