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

AWS Fargate overview

AWS Fargate is a purpose-built pay-as-you-go serverless compute engine that allows you to run containers. By running Windows containers on Fargate, you can focus on building and improving your applications instead of managing and operationalizing ECS Windows container instances, such as patching, monitoring, hardening, capacity planning, and scaling. When scheduling your Fargate Windows-based task, under the hood, AWS launches a new EC2 Windows per task in a controlled environment and exposes it in your account through an ENI:

Figure 6.1 – Fargate Windows-based task architecture

Figure 6.1 – Fargate Windows-based task architecture

Did you realize that each task runs on a separate EC2 Windows instance? Each task provides kernel isolation by default, without the need to use Hyper-V isolation mode on Windows containers, improving container performance and reducing resource consumption on the host. Let’s dive deep into process isolation and Hyper-V isolation mode, which are...