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

Understanding how AWS Nitro impacts container performance

When we think about Windows containers, the last thing that comes to mind is the hardware under the hood that powers the container. However, the combination of the hypervisor, hardware, and software directly affects the network packet flow, network jitter, latency, memory buffer, connections per second, and processing performance within the Windows container.

AWS has built a system called the AWS Nitro System from scratch—a combination of a hypervisor, built-purpose hardware, and software that provides unmatched performance. The AWS Nitro System is divided into five components:

  • The Nitro Hypervisor
  • Nitro Cards
  • The Nitro Security Chip
  • Nitro Trusted Platform Module (Nitro TPM) 2.0
  • Nitro Enclaves

We’ll focus only on the most impactful components for Windows containers: the Nitro Hypervisor and Nitro Cards.

The Nitro Hypervisor is a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-based lightweight...