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

Planning for serverless Windows containers

When planning for serverless Windows containers with AWS Fargate, we need to understand how Fargate behaves with Windows, such as regarding task start-up, pull time, and limitations; these will define whether Fargate Windows-based tasks are a go or no-go solution for you. So, let’s dive deep into each aspect of it.

Fargate Windows-based task start-up time

To understand the Fargate Windows-based task start-up time, we need to understand Windows System Preparation (Sysprep) and AWS Windows faster launching.

Sysprep is a process on Windows that removes PC-specific information from the registry, such as the security identifier (SID). The SID uniquely identifies any entity in a Windows-based network, including users, groups, computer accounts, and more. The process of removing these pieces of information is called generalizing, and it is used during Windows OS image creation.

When planning to deploy Windows Server at scale, companies...