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 9. Managing Secrets

Secrets management is a critical security and operational requirement for modern applications and systems. Credentials such as usernames and passwords are commonly used to authenticate access to resources that may contain private and sensitive data, and it is very important that you can implement a secrets management solution that is able to provide these credentials to your applications in a secure manner that does not expose them to unauthorized parties.

Secrets management for container-based applications is challenging, in part due to the ephemeral nature of containers and the fundamental requirement to run your containers on disposable and repeatable infrastructure. Gone are the days of long-lived servers where you could store secrets in a local file – now your servers are ECS container instances that can come and go, and you need to have some mechanism to be able to dynamically inject secrets into your application at runtime. A naive solution that we have...