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

Preface

Hello there! Windows containers adoption has been increasing over the past years because today, companies need to deploy, coexist, integrate, and maintain two parallel environments in their current IT footprint:

  • Modern infrastructure comprises serverless, containers, IaC, GitOps, and DevSecOps and usually lives in the cloud
  • Legacy infrastructure comprises technologies that usually power their most critical workload in the company but rely on virtual machines and bare metal servers

There are many rumors about full stack modernization, but the actual reality is that legacy infrastructure will continue to exist for years to come for many reasons. Therefore, professionals looking to help their company succeed with the cloud and modern infrastructure adoption will need to know when and how to blend the legacy and the modern infrastructure to reduce cost and achieve operational excellence. Windows containers play a crucial role in this space, allowing companies to reduce costs by moving applications from the legacy to the modern infrastructure, with low code change and offering a better application per server ratio, thereby decreasing Windows Server license costs in the long term.