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

Scheduling an EC2 Windows-based task with Terraform

In Chapter 4, Deploying a Windows Container Instance, in the Deploying a Windows container instance with Terraform section, we covered and deployed an Amazon ECS cluster with container instances using a Launch Template and an Auto Scaling Group.

In this chapter, we will deploy an ECS service to host two EC2 Windows-based tasks and expose these tasks to the internet through an Application Load Balancer (ALB).

Important note

You will see code snippets for the remainder of this section. The full Terraform code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Running-Windows-Containers-on-AWS//tree/main/ecs-ec2-windows.

Deploying an EC2 Windows-based task definition

In this first step, we will create the EC2 Windows-based task definition, which hosts a default IIS Sample Application. You may notice I’m using many variables to make the code more dynamic. You can check out the values in the variables...