How can I run Docker in a AWS Windows Server environment?

Question

Thing I\'d tried:

Toolbox on Windows Server 2012 R2. Disabled Hyper-V to allow virtualbox. I cannot enable virtualization as it\'s on the physical bios.

Installed

Answer 1

You don't actually need to install Docker for Windows (formerly known as the Docker Toolbox) in order to utilize Docker on Windows Server.

First, it's important to understand that there are two different types of containers on the Windows Server 2016 platform: Windows Containers and Hyper-V containers.

• Windows Containers - runs on top of the Windows Server kernel, no virtual machines used here
• Hyper-V Containers - virtual machine containers, each with their own kernel

There's also a third option that runs on top of Hyper-V called Linux Containers on Windows (LCOW), but we won't get into that, as it appears you're specifically asking about Windows containers.

Here are a couple options you can look at:

Bare Metal Instances on AWS

If you absolutely need to run Windows Hyper-V containers on AWS, or want to run Linux containers with Docker for Windows, you can provision the i3.metal EC2 instance type, which is a bare metal instance. You can deploy Windows Server 2016 onto the i3.metal instance type, install Hyper-V, and install Docker for Windows. This will give you the ability to run both Linux containers (under a Hyper-V Linux guest), Hyper-V containers, and Windows containers.

ECS-Optimized AMI

Amazon provides an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that you can deploy EC2 instances from, which contains optimizations for the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). ECS is a cloud-based clustering service that enables you to deploy container-based applications across an array of worker nodes running in EC2.

Generally you'll use ECS and the ECS-optimized AMI together to build a production-scale cluster to deploy your applications onto.

Windows Server 2016 with Containers AMI

There's also a "Windows Server 2016 with Containers" AMI available, which isn't the same as the ECS-optimized AMI, but does include support for running Docker containers on Windows Server 2016. All you have to do is deploy a new EC2 instance, using this AMI, and you can log into it and start issuing Docker commands to launch Windows containers. This option is most likely the easiest option for you, if you're new to Windows containers.