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

Chapter 7. Creating ECS Clusters

In the last chapter, you learned how to build a custom ECS container-instance Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which introduced features you will typically want in your production real-world use cases, including custom storage configurations, CloudWatch logs support, and integration with CloudFormation.

In this chapter, you will put your custom machine image to work, building an ECS cluster composed of ECS container instances based on your custom machine image. Rather than take the approach of previous chapters, of discussing each of the various methods of configuring AWS resources, in this chapter, we will focus on using an infrastructure-as-code approach, and define your ECS cluster and supporting resources using CloudFormation.

The standard model for deploying ECS clusters is based upon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, which consist of a group of EC2 instances that can automatically scale up or down based upon a variety of factors. In the use case of an ECS cluster,...