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

Configuring a NAT gateway


As you learned in the previous section, at the time of writing, ECS task networking does not support the assignment of public IP addresses, which means you must configure additional infrastructure to support any internet connectivity your application might require. Although the application can be accessed without outbound internet access via the application load balancers in your stack, the application container entrypoint script does need to communicate with the AWS Secrets Manager service on startup, which requires internet connectivity to communicate with the Secrets Manager API.

To provide this connectivity, there are two typical approaches you can adopt:

  • Configure a NAT Gateway: This is an AWS-managed service that provides network address translation for outbound communications, enabling hosts and containers located on private subnets to access the internet.
  • Configure an HTTP Proxy: This provides a forward proxy where applications configured with proxy support...