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

Setting up persistent storage

Windows applications that require persistent storage process and output files that need to be available for other systems. In a virtual machine world, this is just a matter of adding an Server Message Block (SMB) share or an additional disk drive (Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume) in the OS. However, with containers, things are different; the writeable layer is temporary storage where containers can write files until they get terminated; once terminated, the data is lost.

Developers can change the code in the application to save application outputs to external storage, such as an Amazon S3 bucket. However, changing this may break things; so do not touch the code, we can let the container orchestrator handle the persistent storage by mounting a local folder in the container. Still, the backend is an SMB share such as Amazon FSx for Windows File Server or an Amazon EBS volume, persisting the data independently of the container life cycle.

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