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 AWS for Windows containers?

A lot of people ask me: Marcio, why should I choose AWS to run Windows containers if Microsoft is the one that built and owns the technology? I prefer to let you choose a cloud provider that addresses your needs and requirements based on your due diligence. In this first topic, we’ll learn about the pace of innovation around Windows containers on AWS.

AWS started supporting Windows containers in December 2017. From there, it learned about the technology, hired experts in the subject, and launched over 11 features and services in almost 5 years. The following list contains the most notable launches around Windows containers, with a drastic increase in pace in 2022:

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) support for Windows, December 2017: AWS started supporting Amazon ECS with Windows Server 2016 and Docker 17.06 Enterprise.
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) support for Windows, October 2019: AWS started supporting Amazon EKS...