Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - How Carrier Global is saving 40% with Windows containers on AWS (ENT212)

Summary

Purvi Goyal, a principal product manager at AWS, and Glenn Buchholz, a principal solutions architect at AWS, along with Matthew Burt from Carrier Global, discuss the benefits of using Windows containers on AWS.
Carrier Global improved their costs by 40% using Amazon ECS to run their Windows containers.
The session covers the evolution of compute platforms, the benefits of containers, and why Windows containers are particularly useful for certain workloads.
Carrier Global's journey involved modernizing a legacy application using containers without changing the code base, resulting in faster deployment, reduced infrastructure costs, and improved user experience.
Two Experience-Based Accelerators (EBAs) were conducted with AWS to optimize Carrier's architecture, leading to significant improvements in cost, speed, and resilience.
The future plans for Carrier include further optimization of instance sizes, provisioning, and boot times, with a move towards serverless technologies like AWS Lambda.
AWS offers a broad set of compute options for running Windows containers, including managed services like ECS, EKS, and Fargate, as well as self-managed options.
AWS provides tools like AWS App2Container (A2C) and resources for cost optimization and training to help customers get started with Windows containers.

Windows containers on AWS provide a path for modernizing legacy applications, improving scalability, and reducing costs without the need for extensive code changes.
The use of AWS services like ECS, EventBridge, API Gateway, ImageBuilder, and EC2 FastLaunch can significantly enhance the architecture of Windows container-based applications.
Experience-Based Accelerators (EBAs) are a collaborative effort between AWS experts and customer engineers to achieve specific, measurable goals in a short time frame, leading to rapid improvements and knowledge transfer.
Carrier Global's case study demonstrates the potential for traditional applications to adopt cloud-native practices and evolve towards serverless architectures, highlighting the flexibility and scalability of AWS services.
AWS's commitment to supporting Windows workloads is evident through its continuous development of features and tools tailored for Windows containers, ensuring that customers have a variety of options to best suit their needs.