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

Understanding a task definition

As mentioned in Chapter 3, Amazon ECS – Overview, a task definition is a JSON file format that works as a blueprint for your application. First, you select the launch type compatibility (Fargate, ECS, or External, which is ECS Anywhere). Next, you set what operation system family (Windows or Linux) the task definition belongs to. Finally, you need to set the task size, the amount of vCPU, and the memory (GB) the containers inside the task can consume from the container instance.

The next step within a task definition is called the container definition, in which you set how the container will behave, such as the container image name, ports to be exposed, vCPU, memory limits (MiB) to be consumed, health checks, storage, and logging. A task definition is immutable, and it can’t be edited once created. Therefore, if any parameter needs to be changed, a new task revision must be created.

When working with Windows-based task definitions...