Amazon has beaten Microsoft to the table, bringing managed Windows container support to AWS in the EC2 Container Service before it’s available in Azure – albeit as a beta service with several caveats. Amazon provides a CloudFormation template which creates a Windows-based EC2 container cluster, so you can get started in a few clicks. In Jeff Bar’s blog post the service is stated as being ready “to containerize and test your Windows applications while we finalize this feature ahead of production use”.
Docker support has been available in Windows Server 2016 since the operating system launched in September 2016. To run containers you need to enable a Windows feature, download the Docker runtime, and use images baesd on Microsoft’s Windows Server Core or Nano Server images. AWS have built a custom Windows Server machine image with Docker already configured, which the CloudFormation template uses to create virtual machines in EC2. Amazon recommends running containerized Windows workloads in a separate cluster from Linux workloads, but within the cluster you can use images from Docker Hub or the EC2 Container Registry.
The user experience with Windows hosts is the same as the existing Linux-based platform – the container hosts run as EC2 virtual machines, and you spin up containers using AWS task definitions.
