Skip to main content

AWS Container Services

Updated Jul 26, 2020 ·
NOTES

This is not an exhaustive documentation of all the existing AWS Services. These are summarized notes that I used for the AWS Certifications.

To see the complete documentation, please go to: AWS documentation

Amazon Elastic Container service (ECS)​

ECS is container orchestration service.

  • ECS helps to run Docker containers and EC2 machines.
  • ECS is made of:
    • ECS EC2: running ECS tasks an user-provisioned EC2 instances.
    • Fargate: running ECS tasks on AWS provisioned compute instances (serverless).
    • EKS: running ECS on AWS powered Kubernetes.
    • ECR: Docker Container Registry hosted on AWS.
  • ECS and Docker are very popular for micro-services.
  • IAM security and roles are at the task level.

Use cases:

  • Run microservices.
  • Run batch processing.
  • Migrate applications to the Cloud.

Key Points:

  • ECS cluster: set of EC2 instances
  • ECS service: application definitions running on ECS cluster
  • ECS tasks + definition: containers running to create the application
  • ECS IAM roles: roles assigned to ECS tasks

ECS Setup and Config file​

  • Run an EC2 instance, install the ECS agent with ECS config file or use ECS-ready Linux AMI (still need to modify the config file).
  • ECS Config file is at /etc/ecs/ecs.config.
  • Config settings:
    • ECS_CLUSTER: to which cluster belongs the EC2 instance
    • ECS_ENGINE_AUTH_DATA: authenticate to private registries
    • ECS_AVAILABLE_LOGGING_DRIVERS: used for enabling CloudWatch logging
    • ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE: enable IAM roles for an ECS tasks

ECS-ALB integration​

  • Application Load Balancer has a direct integration feature with ECS called port mapping.

  • This allows us to run multiple instances of the same application on the same EC2 machine.

  • Use cases:

    • Increase resiliency even if the application is running on one EC2.
    • Maximize utilization of CPU cores.
    • Ability to perform rolling updates without impacting application uptime.

ECS-IAM Task Roles​

  • The EC2 instance running the containers should have an IAM role allowing it to access the ECS service for the ECS agent.

  • Each task inherits EC2 permissions.

  • ECS IAM task role: role dedicated to each task separately.

  • Define a tas role: we can use the taskRoleArn parameter in the task definition.

Fargate​

  • When launching an ECS cluster, we have to create our EC2 instances, which means basically we are managing the underlying infrastructure.

  • With Fargate, this is eliminated since this AWS service is serverless.

  • We have to provide task definitions and AWS will run the container for us.

  • To scale we just have to increase the task number.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)​

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully managed Docker container registry that makes it easy to store, share, and deploy container images.

  • Fully integrated with IAM and ECS.

  • Data is sent over HTTPS and encrypted at rest.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)​

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service and certified Kubernetes conformant to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises.

  • It is a way to launch managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS.

  • Kubernetes is an open-source system for automatic deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

  • It is an alternative to ECS having a different API.

  • EKS supports EC2 if we want to deploy worker nodes or Fargate to deploy serverless containers.