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Amazon ECS

May 16, 20244 min read

Amazon ECS

  • ECS = Elastic Container Service
  • Launch Docker containers on AWS = Launch ECS Tasks on ECS Clusters

EC2 Launch Type

  • EC2 Launch Type: you must provision & maintain the infrastructure
  • Each EC2 instance must run the ECS agent to register in the ECS Cluster
  • AWS takes care of starting/stopping containers

Fargate Launch Type

  • Launch Docker containers on AWS
  • You do not provision the infrastructure (no EC2 instances to manage)
  • Itโ€™s all serverless
  • You just create task definitions
  • AWS just runs ECS tasks for you based on the CPU/RAM you need
  • To scale, just increase the number of tasks

IAM Roles for ECS

  • EC2 Instance Profile (EC2 Launch Type only):
    • Used by the ECS agent
    • Makes API calls to ECS service
    • Send container logs to CloudWatch Logs
    • Pull Docker images from ECR
    • Reference sensitive data in Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store
  • ECS Task Role
    • Allows each task to have a specific role
    • Use different roles for the different ECS services you run
    • Task Role is defined in the task definition

Load Balancer Integrations

  • ALB supported and works most use cases
  • NLB recommended only for high throughput/high performance use cases, or to pair it with AWS Private Link

Data Volumes (EFS)

  • Mount EFS file systems onto ECS tasks
  • Works for both EC2 and Fargate launch types
  • Tasks running in any AZ will share the same data in the EFS file system
  • Fargate + EFS = Serverless
  • Use cases: persistent multi-AZ shared storage for your containers
  • Note: S3 cannot be mounted as a file system

ECS Service Auto Scaling

  • Automatically increase/decrease the desired number of ECS tasks
  • ECS Auto Scaling uses AWS Application Auto Scaling
    • ECS Service Average CPU Utilization
    • ECS Service Average Memory Utilization - Scale on RAM
    • ALB Request Count per Target - metric coming from the ALB
  • Target Tracking - scale based on target value for a specific CloudWatch metric
  • Step Scaling - scale based on a specified CloudWatch Alarm
  • Scheduled Scaling - scale based on a specified date/time (predictable changes)
  • ECS Service Auto Scaling (task level) != EC2 Auto Scaling (EC2 instance level)
  • Fargate Auto Scaling is much easier to setup (because Serverless)

Amazon ECR

  • ECR = Elastic Container Registry
  • Store and manage Docker images on AWS
  • Private and Public repository (Amazon ECR Public Gallery)
  • Fully integrated with ECS, backed by S3
  • Access is controlled through IAM (permission errors โ‡’ policy)
  • Supports image vulnerability scanning, versioning, image tags, image lifecycle, โ€ฆ

Amazon EKS

  • EKS = Elastic Kubernetes Service
  • It is a way to launch managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS
  • K8s is an open-source system for automatic deployment, scaling, and management of containerized(usually Docker) applications
  • Itโ€™s an alternative to ECS, similar goal but different API
  • EKS supports EC2 if you want to deploy worker nodes or Fargate to deploy serverless containers
  • Use case: if company is already using K8s on-premises or in another cloud, and wants to migrate to AWS using K8s
  • K8s is cloud-agnostic (can be used in any cloud - Azure, GCP, โ€ฆ)

Node Types

  • Managed Node Groups
    • Creates and manages Nodes (EC2 instances) for you
    • Nodes are part of an ASG managed by EKS
    • Supports On-Demand or Spot Instances
  • Self-Managed Nodes
    • Nodes created by you and registered to the EKS cluster and managed by an ASG
    • You can use prebuilt AMI - Amazon EKS Optimized AMI
    • Supports On-Demand or Spot Instances
  • AWS Fargate
    • No maintenance required, no nodes managed

Data Volumes

  • Need to specify Storage Class manifest on your EKS cluster
  • Leverages a Container Storage Interface (CSI) compliant driver
  • Supports:
    • EBS
    • EFS (works with Fargate)
    • FSx for Lustre
    • FSx for NetApp ONTAP

AWS App Runner

  • Fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy web applications and APIs at scale
  • No infrastructure experience required
  • Start with your source code or container image
  • Automatically builds and deploy the web app
  • Automatic scaling, high availability, load balancer, encryption
  • VPC access support
  • Connect to database, cache, and message queue services
  • Use cases: web apps, APIs, microservices, rapid production deployments

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