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 a Fargate Windows-based task definition with Terraform

In Chapter 5, Deploying an EC2 Windows-Based Task, in the Scheduling an EC2 Windows-based task with Terraform section, we created an EC2-based task definition, ECS service, an Auto Scaling group, and an application load balancer (ALB) to handle the traffic.

In this chapter, we will see how easy it is to accomplish the same results using Fargate Windows-based tasks. Some configurations were removed or changed compared to the Terraform code shown in Chapter 5, as we don’t rely on managing EC2 instances or Auto Scaling groups. It is simpler!

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-fargate-windows.

Deploying a Fargate Windows-based task definition

In this first step, we will create the Fargate Windows-based task definition, which...