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 an EC2 Auto Scaling group


You have established an ECS cluster, but without ECS container instances to provide a container runtime and compute resources, the cluster is not of much use. At this point, you could create individual ECS container instances and join them to the cluster, however, such an approach is not feasible if you have the requirement to run production workloads that need to support tens or hundreds of containers, dynamically adding and removing ECS container instances to the cluster depending on the current resource requirements of the cluster.

The AWS mechanism to deliver such behavior for your ECS container instances is the EC2 Auto Scaling group, which operates as a collection of EC2 instances that share identical configurations referred to as launch configurations. The EC2 Auto Scaling service is a managed service provided by AWS, and takes care of managing the lifecycle your EC2 Auto Scaling groups and the EC2 instances that make up the group. This mechanism...