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)

Summary


Secrets management is a challenge for the ephemeral nature of Docker applications, where the notion of preconfigured long-running servers with credentials stored in a configuration file is no longer an option, and injecting passwords directly as externally configured environment variables is considered a bad security practice. This requires a secrets management solution where your applications can dynamically fetch secrets from a secure credential store, and in this chapter you successfully implemented such a solution using the AWS Secrets Manager and KMS services.

You learned how to create a KMS key, which encrypts and decrypts confidential information, and is used by AWS Secrets Manager to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of secrets it stores. You next were introduced to the AWS Secrets Manager and learned how to create secrets using both the AWS console and AWS CLI. You learned how you can store multiple key/value pairs in your secrets, and were introduced to features such...