Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS optimized Amazon Machine Images for Microsoft Windows Server now use Docker CE runtime
Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS-optimized Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server have traditionally leveraged Mirantis Container Runtime (formerly Docker Engine – Enterprise) as the default runtime framework. AWS customers have been using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS to run and optimize their Microsoft Windows Server workloads. AWS has now migrated all the latest (September 2022) container-optimized Windows Server AMIs to use Docker Community Edition (CE). This change is to help customers avoid paying additional costs to get continued support, bug fixes and security patches for Mirantis Container Runtime with the Microsoft announcement to transfer support for Mirantis Container Runtime to Mirantis at the end of September 2022.
Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS-optimized Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server have traditionally leveraged Mirantis Container Runtime (formerly Docker Engine – Enterprise) as the default runtime framework. AWS customers have been using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS to run and optimize their Microsoft Windows Server workloads. AWS has now migrated all the latest (September 2022) container-optimized Windows Server AMIs to use Docker Community Edition (CE). This change is to help customers avoid paying additional costs to get continued support, bug fixes and security patches for Mirantis Container Runtime with the Microsoft announcement to transfer support for Mirantis Container Runtime to Mirantis at the end of September 2022.
With this change, customers leveraging September 2022 or later ECS and EKS optimized AMIs for their Windows containers will automatically use the Docker CE runtime. Customers who are using an auto scaling group with their ECS or EKS clusters can create a new version of the launch template to use a September or later container optimized AMI to use the Docker CE runtime for new instances getting added to existing clusters/auto scaling groups. The instances that were launched using the August 2022 or previous version of these AMIs will continue to run without any interruption. In addition to Docker CE, customers running Windows containers using Amazon EKS can optionally enable the containerd runtime. To enable the containerd runtime for EKS, visit EKS public documentation.
Customers can currently run Windows containers on a number of AWS-managed container orchestration services (Amazon ECS (on EC2 and AWS Fargate), Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS Anywhere), in addition to using self-managed options. Visit our public documentation for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS to learn more about running Windows containers on AWS and visit public AWS Regions to learn about regional availability.