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 ECS service discovery resources


ECS service discovery is a feature that allows your client applications to discover ECS services in a dynamic environment, where container-based endpoints come and go. To date, we have used AWS application load balancers to perform this function, where you configure a stable service endpoint that your applications can connect to, with connections then load balanced across an ECS-managed target group that includes each of the ECS tasks associated with your ECS service.  Although this is generally my recommended best practice approach, for applications that don't support load balancers (for example, UDP-based applications), or for very large microservice architectures where it is more efficient to have direct communication with a given ECS task, ECS service discovery may be a better approach than using load balancers.

Note

ECS service discovery also supports AWS load balancers, where ECS will publish the IP address of the load balancer listener if...