Book Image

Docker on Amazon Web Services

By : Justin Menga
Book Image

Docker on Amazon Web Services

By: Justin Menga

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, Docker has been the gold standard for building and distributing container applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leader in public cloud computing, and was the first to offer a managed container platform in the form of the Elastic Container Service (ECS). Docker on Amazon Web Services starts with the basics of containers, Docker, and AWS, before teaching you how to install Docker on your local machine and establish access to your AWS account. You'll then dig deeper into the ECS, a native container management platform provided by AWS that simplifies management and operation of your Docker clusters and applications for no additional cost. Once you have got to grips with the basics, you'll solve key operational challenges, including secrets management and auto-scaling your infrastructure and applications. You'll explore alternative strategies for deploying and running your Docker applications on AWS, including Fargate and ECS Service Discovery, Elastic Beanstalk, Docker Swarm and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). In addition to this, there will be a strong focus on adopting an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach using AWS CloudFormation. By the end of this book, you'll not only understand how to run Docker on AWS, but also be able to build real-world, secure, and scalable container platforms in the cloud.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Running ECS tasks


We've seen how we can deploy long-running applications as ECS services, but how do we run ad-hoc tasks or short-lived containers using ECS? The answer of course is to create an ECS task, which typically are used to run ad-hoc tasks, such as running a deployment script, performing database migrations, or perhaps performing scheduled batch processing.

Although ECS services are essentially long-running ECS tasks, ECS does treat ECS tasks that you create yourself quite differently from ECS services, as described in the following table:

Scenario/feature

ECS service behavior

ECS task behavior

Container is stopped or fails

ECS will always attempt to maintain the desired count of a given ECS service, and will attempt to restart a container if the active count falls below the desired count due to a container being stopped or failing.

ECS tasks are one-shot executions that are either success or fail. ECS will never attempt to re-run a failed ECS task.

Task definition configuration

You cannot...