Elastic Container Service
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About
Highly secure, reliable, & scalable way to run containers
Alternatives
- Google Container Engine (GKE)
- Azure Container Service
- IBM Bluemix Container Service
- Jelastic Multi-Cloud PaaS
Terminology
| Amazon ECS | Term Definition |
|---|---|
| Cluster | Logical Grouping of EC2 Instances |
| Container | Instance EC2 instance running the ECS agent |
| Task Definition | Blueprint that describes how a docker container should launch |
| Task | A running container using settings in a Task Definition |
| Service | Defines long running tasks – can control task count with Auto Scaling and attach an ELB |
Digest
- Microservices are built in multiple programming languages
- Containers simplify deployment of microservices:
- Step 1 : Create a self contained Docker image
- Application Runtime (JDK or Python), Application code and Dependencies
- Step 2 : Run it as a container any where Local machine OR Corporate data center OR Cloud
- Step 1 : Create a self contained Docker image
- Use On-Demand instances or Spot instances
- Launch type: EC2 or Fargate
- Data volumes attached to containers
- Deployment type:
- Rolling update
- Blue/green deployment (powered by AWS CodeDeploy)
- Task Placement Strategies:
- binpack - Leave least amount of unused CPU or memory. Minimizes number of container instances in use
- random - Random task placement
- spread - Based on specified values:
- Host (instanceId)
- (OR) Availability Zone(attribute:ecs.availability-zone)
- (Alowed) Combine strategies and prioritize
- How do you manage 100s of containers?
- ECS - Fully managed service for container orchestration
- Step 1 : Create a Cluster (Group of one or more EC2 instances)
- Step 2: Deploy your microservice containers
- AWS Fargate: Serverless ECS. DON’T worry about EC2 instances.
- Cloud Neutral: Kubernetes
- AWS - AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Load balancing:
- Performed using Application Load Balancers
- Dynamic host port mapping: Multiple tasks from the same service are allowed per EC2 (container) instance
- Path-based routing: Multiple services can use the same listener port on same ALB and be routed based on path (<www.myapp.com/microservice-a> and <www.myapp.com/microservice-b>)
- Performed using Application Load Balancers
Price
Use Cases
Type: Containers
Same type services: Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Fargate
Best practice:
- 10 Microservices => 10 Task Definitions => 10 Task IAM Roles with individual permissions needed by each microservice
ECS vs EKS
Amazon also provides the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) which can be used to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS.
| Amazon ECS | Amazon EKS |
|---|---|
| Managed, highly available, highly scalable container platform | Managed, highly available, highly scalable container platform |
| AWS-specific platform that supports Docker Containers | Compatible with upstream Kubernetes so it’s easy to lift and shift from other Kubernetes deployments |
| Considered simpler and easier to use | Considered more feature-rich and complex with a steep learning curve |
| Leverages AWS services like Route 53, ALB, and CloudWatch | A hosted Kubernetes platform that handles many things internally |
| “Tasks” are instances of containers that are run on underlying compute but more of less isolated | “Pods” are containers collocated with one another and can have shared access to each other |
| Limited extensibility | Extensible via a wide variety of third-party and community add-ons. |
Questions
Q1
You are asked to establish a baseline for normal Amazon ECS performance in your environment by measuring performance at various times and under different load conditions. To establish a baseline, Amazon recommends that you should at a minimum monitor the CPU and ____ for your Amazon ECS clusters and the CPU and ____ metrics for your Amazon ECS services.
- memory reservation and utilization; concurrent connections
- memory utilization; memory reservation and utilization
- concurrent connections; memory reservation and utilization
- memory reservation and utilization; memory utilization