AWS goes live with Windows containers... but contain yourselves: It's going to be niche

AWS has confirmed the arrival of Windows Containers on its Elastic Container Service (ECS) – but with caveats that show limitations versus the more commonly used Linux-based containers. Windows Server containers were introduced in Windows Server 2016 and enhanced in Windows Server 2019. Amazon's new service provides AMIs ( …

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux containers are newcomers

Container technology was born on Linux

Container technology was born on Solaris, in 2004. Solaris Containers

[Joe Montana]

Re: Linux containers are newcomers

Before solaris even, chroot() has been a thing on unix for many years and there were various container setups like vservers and freevxd much earlier than 2004.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux containers are newcomers

Very little is "slick" on AWS. Having Powershell on Azure is just so much easier to learn and way more powerful and flexible than the zoo of solutions on AWS.

[regbadgerer]

Is this new?

This has been around for a while hasn't it, maybe as much as a year? Struggling to see what the story is here?

[Tim Anderson]

Re: Is this new?

GA is new. Was previously a preview.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows containers

"Finally, AWS noted that Windows Server Containers are large, typically starting at 9GB"

I can create a Linux container for a test web application that's around 200MB of which around 20MB is the base Linux OS and it starts in under a second making it ideal to scale up and scale down based on load and run multiple instances that are cloned from a RO source and data is written to a database/fileshare.

Why would I do the same with a fat Windows application where my 200MB OS+App becomes 3-4GB once I add in the OS, IIS, dotNet and any other support libraries? I pay more for the disk space, need more RAM fro the OS to achieve similar performance levels and my start up time is significantly longer meaning I leave more unused capacity running in case of a spike in load. I can see it being useful for development where performance is less important, but not so much for testing/production

[phuzz]

Re: Windows containers

From TFA:

"Windows containers are primarily for legacy applications."

This isn't for your web application. It's for some bespoke bit of software that's so fragile that no-one wants to try porting it, and yet is critical to the running of the business .

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows containers

But why use containers rather than an alternative?

I would suggest that if it is so fragile, any containerized environment will require significant effort to get an off the shelf container "just right" for your legacy app (i.e. the correct libraries/dotNet version). You can migrate the P2V/V2V is likely to be significantly easier.

Or is it more important to have a "new technology" than a proven solution?

[TheVogon]

Re: Windows containers

A Windows Nano server Docker container is 232MB

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows containers

Not with .Net installed, and it's borderline on pointless without it.

[TheVogon]

Re: Windows containers

Ok so plus 24MB for the .NET core runtime install or plus 80MB for the full .NET framework.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows containers

.Net full doesn't run under Nano and MS have no plans to add support as there are too many dependencies required.

If the app runs under .Net Core then might as well use Linux and get the entire base under 100MB including the runtime and save more cost. That stuff really adds up over a large infrastructure.

As even the MS rep said in TFA, Windows containers are targeted at legacy apps.

[Teiwaz]

Windows Containers?

They're called bins over here.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Let me know when you ca the have Docker and Virtual Box on the same Windows machine

[LOGI]

Could anyone please elaborate this news for me?

Because I'm into this field.