When doing a customer demo, I often need a simple app. Generally I am discussing the infrastructure – Elastic Load Balancer, API Gateway, etc – and the application is unimportant. I have found that phpinfo is a great sample application because it shows the headers received by the server. This allows me to see x-forwarded-for headers, etc. On Windows, ASP.NET Tracing provides similar results. Keep in mind that these utilities expose a lot of info about your environment so use them wisely.

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).

Early in my career, I learned an important lesson: backup is easy, but restore is hard. Too often we take our backup and recovery for granted. We assume that if the backup completed successful, the restore will work when we need it. Anyone who has been through a disaster recovery exercise, whether simulated or real, knows this is seldom the case.

In this post I discuss creating consistent backups of Windows Servers using the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots. I will also use AWS Systems Manager to schedule daily backups of EBS volumes during a defined maintenance window. Feel free to follow along, but be aware that there is a CloudFormation template toward the end that will help you configure the final solution.