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

Amazon ECS – fundamentals

Amazon ECS is a managed container orchestrator created by AWS that allows customers to run containers as tasks. A task is defined in a task definition, a kind of configuration blueprint in which you specify container configurations, such as the amount of vCPU, memory, network ports, and more.

Amazon ECS comprises the following components:

  • Clusters
  • Container instances
  • Task definitions
  • Tasks
  • Services

Clusters are the logical grouping of tasks or services. Amazon ECS clusters are free of charge, and you only pay for the underlying infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2 Windows instances, Amazon EBS, Amazon CloudWatch, and so on. Figure 3.1 illustrates an empty Amazon ECS cluster and an existing VPC. When you deploy an empty Amazon ECS cluster, no resources are created inside or outside the VPC.

The container instance is the Amazon EC2 instance name that works as an ECS cluster member. The ECS agent installed acts as a man...