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

Right-sizing a Windows container instance

I have seen many customers struggling to identify the right EC2 instance type for their Windows container workloads, usually, because they are using the same right-sizing approach that is used on Linux and forgetting to match the hardware requirements for Windows Server.

When right-sizing an ECS Windows container instance, we need to take into account four pillars:

  • Storage
  • Processor
  • Memory
  • Network

We will explore these pillars next.

Storage

Storage is one of the most complex calculations during right-sizing as it uses different inputs, such as AMI, container image size, the number of other containers running in the same host, temporary files, paging, and dump files.

Following the official Microsoft documentation for hardware requirements for Windows Server, a minimum of 32 GB is considered for a successful installation based on a Server Core installation, which, in our case, means the Amazon ECS-optimized...