Building Linux Docker Containers on EC2 Windows

Brian

December 21, 2020

In the post, I will show you how to build a Linux container in Visual Studio running on a EC2 Windows Instance.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio allows you to deploy your project to Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate and recently as a container image to AWS Lambda among other options. In both of these cases, you must build a Linux container from Visual Studio or the dotnet command line. If you are working in Visual Studio on Windows, Docker Desktop uses a Linux container running in Hyper-V to build the container. Unfortunately, Hyper-V does not run on EC2 Instances (though it will run on EC2 bare metal).

Docker employs a client/server architecture where the server, dockerd, typical runs as a daemon on Linux. By default, the docker command line client talks to the dockerd service on the same host a local file descriptor fd://. However, is also supports other connection methods including tcp. You can add a –host or -H to the dockerd command when you start the server. For example dockerd -H tcp://0.0.0.0 instructs the Docker service to listen on all IP addresses.

Note that, as described in the Docker documentation, you should set up mTLS to authenticate requests. I am using an VPC Security Group to control access to the Linux server from my Windows client.

Assuming that dockerd is running as a daemon, we can override the default options used when calling service docker start by creating a /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/options.conf file to override the defaults that looks like this:

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[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// -H tcp://0.0.0.0 --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock $OPTIONS $DOCKER_STORAGE_OPTIONS $DOCKER_ADD_RUNTIMES

I have created an EC2 userdata script that also installs and configures docker.

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#! /bin/bash
amazon-linux-extras install docker
mkdir /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d
cat << 'EOF' > /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/options.conf 
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// -H tcp://0.0.0.0 --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock $OPTIONS $DOCKER_STORAGE_OPTIONS $DOCKER_ADD_RUNTIMES
EOF
systemctl daemon-reload
service docker start
usermod -a -G docker ec2-user

Once the Linux server is running, I can install Docker Desktop on the Windows client. I disable the Enable Hyper-V Features during the installation.