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Amazon ECS

  • Elastic Container Service
  • Launch docker container on AWS = Launch ECS Tasks on ECS Cluster.

EC2 Launch Type​

  • Must provision and maintain the infrastructure.
  • Each EC2 Instances must run the ECS Agent to register in ECS Cluster.

Fargate Launch Type​

  • Serverless
  • Create task definitions.
  • To scale, just increase the number of tasks.

IAM Roles for ECS​

EC2 Instance Profile​

  • Make API calls to ECS Service.
  • Send container logs to CloudWatch.
  • Pull Docker image from ECR.
  • Reference sensitive data in Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store.

ECS Task Role​

  • Each task have specific role.
  • Different roles for different ECS services.
  • Task role is defined in task definition.

Load Balancer Integrations​

  • Application Load Balancer (Works for most cases)
  • Network Load Balancer (Recommended only for high thoughput)
  • Classic Load Balancer (Not recommended)

Data Volumes​

  • Mount EFS file systems onto ECS tasks.
  • Works for both launch types.
  • Fargate + EFS = Serverless
  • Amazon S3 cannot be mounted.

ECS Service Auto Scaling​

  • Automatically increase or decrease the number of ECS tasks.
  • ECS Autoscaling uses AWS Application Auto Scaling.
    • Average CPU Utilization
    • Average Memory Utilization
    • ALB request count per target

EC2 Launch Type​

  • Auto Scaling Group
  • ECS Cluster Capacity Provider

Solution Architectures​