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

Understanding ECS container instances


Creating an ECS cluster was very easy using the wizard provided by the AWS console, however it should be obvious that a lot of things were happening under the hood to get your ECS cluster up and running. A full discussion of all of the resources that were created is outside the scope of this introductory chapter, however at this stage, it is useful to focus on ECS container instances and examine them in further detail, given they collectively form the heart of ECS clusters.

Joining an ECS cluster

As the ECS create cluster wizard launched instances and created our ECS cluster, you may have wondered how exactly an ECS container instance joins an ECS cluster. The answer to this is very simple and can be understood easily by clicking on the EC2 instance ID link of the ECS container instance in your newly created cluster.

This link will take you to the EC2 Dashboard with the EC2 instance associated with the container instance selected, as shown in the following...