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.

Who this book is for

This book targets solution architects, DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and containers experts willing to learn more about Windows containers on AWS. To learn the most from the book, readers should have basic Docker, Kubernetes, and container experience, as the book does not mean to teach you container fundamentals; instead, it is laser-focused on the lessons learned from the field.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Windows Container 101, covers how Windows containers play an important role in application modernization, followed by a deep dive into the Windows container primitives and resource control on Windows Server.

Chapter 2, Amazon Web Services – Breadth and Depth, covers why AWS is the best cloud provider for running Windows container workloads.

Chapter 3, Amazon ECS – Overview, covers Amazon ECS fundamentals and Windows network components, followed by a Terraform deployment code example.

Chapter 4, Deploying a Windows Container Instance, explores how to deploy and right-size ECS Windows container instances, followed by Terraform deployment code sample.

Chapter 5, Deploying an EC2 Windows-Based Task, will teach you how to deploy EC2 Windows-based tasks on ECS and the options to integrate with Active Directory, as well as setting up persistent storage for stateful Windows containers followed by a Terraform deployment code example.

Chapter 6, Deploying a Fargate Windows-Based Task, covers how to deploy an AWS Fargate Windows task on Amazon ECS, followed by Terraform deployment code examples.

Chapter 7, Amazon EKS – Overview, helps you understand how Amazon EKS operates under the hood and discusses its Windows components.

Chapter 8, Preparing the Cluster for OS Interoperability, teaches you how to operate a heterogeneous Amazon EKS cluster.

Chapter 9, Deploying a Windows Node Group, teaches you how to deploy Windows worker nodes on Amazon EKS with persistent storage for a stateful application, followed by a Terraform code example.

Chapter 10, Managing a Windows Pod, teaches you how to deploy Windows pods on Amazon EKS, combining best practices to use taints and tolerations, runtime class, and resource control, followed by the Active Directory integration options.

Chapter 11, Monitoring and Logging, explores centralized metrics and logs for Windows containers running on Amazon ECS, EKS, and Fargate using CloudWatch Logs and Fluentbit.

Chapter 12, Managing a Windows Container’s Image Life Cycle, teaches you how to keep your Windows container’s image secure by applying security patches and understanding how it applies to immutable container images.

Chapter 13, Working with Ephemeral Hosts, teaches you how to operate Windows Server as an ephemeral host, the advantages of doing so, and how it plays a core role in container clusters all by leveraging an automated Amazon Machine Image (AMI) pipeline using EC2 Image Builder.

Chapter 14, Implementing a Container Image Cache Strategy, teaches you how to reduce your Windows container's launch time by implementing an automated image cache strategy using EC2 Image Builder.

Chapter 15, AWS Windows Containers Deployment Tools, covers the ancillary AWS tools available for deploying and operating Windows containers on AWS.

To get the most out of this book

You will need Terraform installed on your computer – the latest version. All code examples have been tested using Terraform version 1.3.9 and Hashicorp AWS module 4.0.

You can follow the official Hashicorp Terraform installation guide on the following website: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/aws-get-started/install-cli.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Running-Windows-Containers-on-AWS. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/cgYuN

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “Something that changed from the previous EC2 Windows-based task is that Fargate uses awsvpc; thereby, we need to add the proper porting mappings.”

A block of code is set as follows:

resource "aws_alb_listener" "ecs_alb_listener" {
  load_balancer_arn = aws_lb.ecs_alb.arn
  port              = 80
  protocol          = "HTTP"

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

apiVersion: node.k8s.io/v1 
kind: RuntimeClass 
metadata: 
   name: windows-2019 
handler: 'docker'

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

terraform init
terraform apply

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. Here is an example: “Assuming you have two Kubernetes deployments, Deployment 1 deploys the frontend, and Deployment 2 deploys the backend.”

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

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