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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned why Windows containers are an essential topic for organizations going through their modernization journey and why it may be a challenge due to a lack of expertise; then, we delved into how Windows Server exposes container primitives through the HCS and how container runtimes interact with the Windows kernel for resource controls. We also delved into the Windows container base images available, image sizing, and licensing.

In a nutshell, the use case for a Windows container is very straightforward; if it can’t be solved with Linux due to incompatibility or application dependencies/requirements, then go with Windows, period. To add more to that, in the same way that we shouldn’t use Windows containers to run a Go application, we shouldn’t even try to use a Linux container to run a .NET Framework application.

In Chapter 2, Amazon Web Services – Breadth and Depth, we will understand why AWS is the best choice for running Windows containers. You will learn how AWS Nitro improves container performance and the information you need to choose what AWS container orchestrator make sense for your use case.