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-optimized Windows AMIs

AWS provides customers with the Amazon ECS Windows-optimized AMIs, which are preconfigured with the necessary components such as Docker Engine, ECS Agent, and Hyper-V vSwitch, to run Windows containers as tasks successfully.

There are four Amazon ECS Windows-optimized AMI variants:

  • Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Server 2022 Full AMI
  • Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Server 2022 Core AMI
  • Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Server 2019 Full AMI
  • Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Server 2019 Core AMI

The Full AMI has the Windows Desktop Experience GUI installed, and the Core AMI installation is based on Server Core (only PowerShell). The main difference between one and another is the GUI shell packages:

  • Microsoft-Windows-Server-Gui-Mgmt-Package
  • Microsoft-Windows-Server-Shell-Package
  • Microsoft-Windows-Server-Gui-RSAT-Package
  • Microsoft-Windows-Cortana-PAL-Desktop-Package

Not having these shell packages installed drastically...