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

EC2 instances do not allow for nested virtualization (EC2 instances are themselves virtual machines). Docker for Windows uses Hyper-V under the hood, and Docker Toolbox uses Virtualbox under the hood, so neither of those solutions are viable.

Even if you were able to run them on a Windows EC2 instance, the performance wouldn't be that great due to the fact that Docker for Windows mounts files into the Docker VM via Samba, which is not very fast.

If you want to run Linux containers, you should probably run them on Linux. It's very fast to get set up, and all of the Docker commands that you're used to with Docker for Windows should still work.