Getting started with AWS App2Container
AWS App2Container is a tool that helps you break down the work of moving your applications into containers, and configuring them to be hosted in AWS using the Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, or App Runner container management services.
The following sections demonstrate the initial setup of your containerization environment, starting with prerequisites and initial workflow decisions. Then we take you step by step through containerizing a basic application using App2Container. We generate the artifacts that you can use to deploy it on Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, or AWS App Runner, and then we clean up.
To avoid creating billable AWS resources, we stop before the final deployment. You can review the deployment artifacts that are created by the generate app-deployment command to see what we would create.
For an overview of the command phases that includes summary information and command reference links for all of the App2Container commands, see the App2Container command reference.
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Understand Docker containers
The following resources can help you get the most out of your application containers by understanding what goes into them.
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To learn more about Docker containers on AWS, see What is Docker?
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Use the Docker command line reference to look up Docker commands. See Use the Docker command line
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Decide where containerization will run
To use App2Container on the server where the applications are running, you must set up an AWS profile, install App2Container, and install the Docker engine. If your server does not meet the requirements to containerize your application and deploy it to AWS, or if you do not want to install the Docker engine on the application server, you can set up and use a worker machine. On the worker machine, you can run the steps to containerize your application and deploy it to AWS, or you can set up connectivity between the worker machine and the application servers to run remote commands from the worker machine, targeting the application servers.
The following are example situations where you might decide to set up a worker machine:
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Your application servers are running in an on-premises data center and they do not have internet access.
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Your application server is running on a Windows operating system that does not support containers. For more information, see Supported applications.
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You prefer to use a dedicated server to run the containerization and deployment steps.
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You want to consolidate your work by using a worker machine to run commands for all of your application servers.
When you set up a worker machine to handle the steps to containerize and deploy your applications, it must have the same operating system platform as your application server (Linux or Windows), and the operating system must support containers. We recommend that you launch an Amazon EC2 instance as the worker machine, using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is optimized for Amazon ECS.
