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

Testing and building the application using Docker Compose


In the previous section, you used Docker commands to perform the following tasks:

  • Build a test image
  • Run tests
  • Build a release image
  • Run the application

Each time we ran a Docker command, we had to supply quite a bit of configuration, and trying to remember the various commands that you need to run is already starting to become difficult. In addition to this, we also discovered that to start the release image for the application, we need to have an operational external database.  For local testing use cases, running an external database in another container is an excellent approach, but having to orchestrate this by running a series of Docker commands with lots of different input parameters very quickly becomes difficult to manage.

Docker Compose is a tool that allows you to orchestrate multi-container environments using a declarative approach, making it much easier to orchestrate complex workflows that may require multiple containers....