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

Deploying an Amazon ECS cluster with Terraform

This is the first deployment topic we will go over, and it is essential to understand how this will work. I believe that filling up pages with code doesn’t make much sense; instead, the complete code is available on GitHub per chapter, and in the book, we will use code snippets to illustrate each step.

Terraform offers a lot of string functions and expressions, which can be very complex to understand first-hand. Therefore, I will try to make the code as simple as possible so that you can understand the code easily if you are a Terraform beginner or an advanced developer.

Decoupling your Terraform code into modules is a typical pattern used in Terraform. For example, customers usually create reusable standalone modules to deploy security groups, ELB, EC2, and so on and then merge them into the root module. To keep the code simple and avoid many inter-module dependencies, I have described the entire Amazon ECS and its components...