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 (20 chapters)

Creating ECS task definitions


You have now reached the point where you have defined an ECS cluster using CloudFormation and created a number of supporting resources, including an RDS instance for your application database and an Application Load Balancer to service connections to your application.

At this stage, you are ready to create the ECS resources that will represent your application, which include ECS task definitions and ECS services.

We will get started by defining an ECS task definition in your CloudFormation template, as demonstrated in the following example:

Parameters:
  ...
  ...
  ApplicationImageId:
    Type: String
    Description: ECS Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID
  ApplicationImageTag:
    Type: String
    Description: Application Docker Image Tag
    Default: latest
  ApplicationSubnets:
    Type: List<AWS::EC2::Subnet::Id>
    Description: Target subnets for EC2 instances
  ...
  ...

Resources:
ApplicationTaskDefinition:
    Type: AWS::ECS::TaskDefinition
    Properties...