Use SMB storage with Windows containers on AWS Fargate

Introduction

Customers can run their Windows container-based applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using AWS Fargate to avoid the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing servers. A common use case for Windows Containers on AWS is to run web applications hosted using Internet Information Services (IIS). When using common files in a web farm, virtual directories are used to map external storage to the web site, so that files aren’t stored on individual web server nodes. In this post, we discuss how customers can use external Server Message Block (SMB) storage, such as Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, in their Windows applications on AWS Fargate.

Distributed Windows applications frequently have a need to read or write to a centralized Windows file share. A common solution is to mount a file-share to the Windows container host and then expose that volume to running containers using SMB Global Mappings. The volume is then visible to the container as a mount …