Improve startup time for Amazon ECS Fargate Tasks with Windows Containers

Question

Is there a way to improve the startup time for Amazon ECS Fargate tasks on Windows Containers? I am trying to deploy a legacy .NET Framework application on ECS Fargate. The application requires the Windows Server Core base image. It takes about 11 minutes for the fargate task to start.

Earlier, I had tried with Amazon ECS EC2 launch type with a customer AMI with cached docker images for Windows Server Core and the application startup time was about 2 minutes. I am wondering if there is a way with ECS Fargate to benefit from Windows Server base image caching.

Answer 1

Fargate recently added support for serverless windows containers. We tried adopting it in the same month it got rolled out to the public. We had to scrape information and get in touch with support to resolve issues. I am attaching the docs so it can help others.

Answering your question, we saw the same situations, fargate startup time for windows were way worse than the EC2 approach. sometimes it took 15 mins to get the service to Running state.

If this is a deal-breaker for you, I recommend sticking to the ec2 approach in production. We noticed scaling up ec2 from scratch on windows was way inefficient and that is where faragte showed improvements.

AWS Fargate Windows docs

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/running-windows-containers-with-amazon-ecs-on-aws-fargate/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-fargate-amazon-ecs-windows-containers/

Opinion, The windows serverless containers, still needs to mature. we decided not to go with it in production.