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 agent

As explained in the previous chapter, the ECS container agent is responsible for communicating between the Amazon ECS cluster and the Amazon EC2 instance. The ECS agent sends information about the currently running tasks and resource utilization of containers from the container instance to the Amazon ECS cluster. The ECS agent also receives the request from the Amazon ECS cluster to start and stop tasks:

Figure 4.1 – ECS agent two-way communication with an ECS cluster

Figure 4.1 – ECS agent two-way communication with an ECS cluster

ECS Agent runs as a Windows service on the Windows container instance, and it communicates with the Docker daemon through a named pipe at \\.\pipe\docker_engine. A named pipe is a mechanism for facilitating communication between two processes using shared memory.

You can use PipeList from Windows System Internals to list the Windows opened pipes:

Figure 4.2 – Listing pipelines with Pipelist

Figure 4.2 – Listing pipelines with Pipelist

Assuming we are launching a new Amazon...