Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install and operate your own container orchestration software, manage and scale a cluster of virtual machines, or schedule containers on those virtual machines. With simple API calls, you can launch and stop Docker-enabled applications, query the complete state of your application, and access many familiar features such as IAM roles, security groups, load balancers, Amazon CloudWatch Events, AWS CloudFormation templates, and AWS CloudTrail logs. FEATURES: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) allows you to easily run, scale, and secure Docker container applications on AWS. Applications packaged as containers locally will deploy and run in the same way as containers managed by Amazon ECS. Amazon ECS eliminates the need to install, operate, and scale your own container orchestration and cluster management infrastructure, and allows you to focus on the resource needs and availability requirements of your containerized application. Amazon ECS enables you to grow from a single container to thousands of containers across hundreds of instances without creating additional complexity in how you run your application. You can run anything: applications, batch jobs, or microservices. Amazon ECS abstracts away all the complexity of the infrastructure so you can focus on designing, building, and running containerized applications. With Amazon ECS, you can use AWS Fargate to fully manage your infrastructure and just focus on deploying containers Or, you can choose to have complete visibility and control of your underlying server cluster from creating and terminating Docker containers to viewing detailed cluster state information. You can integrate and use your own container scheduler or connect Amazon ECS into your existing software delivery process, such as continuous integration and delivery systems. AWS Fargate Support AWS Fargate technology is available with Amazon ECS. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to select Amazon EC2 instance types, provision and scale clusters, or patch and update each server. You do not have to worry about task placement strategies, such as binpacking or host spread and tasks are automatically balanced across availability zones. Fargate manages the availability of containers for you. You just define your application’s requirements, select Fargate as your launch type in the console or CLI, and Fargate takes care of all the scaling and infrastructure management required to run your containers. For developers who require more granular, server-level control over the infrastructure, Amazon ECS EC2 launch type allows you to manage a cluster of servers and schedule placement of containers on the servers. Development Docker Support Amazon ECS supports Docker and enables you to run and manage Docker containers. Applications you package as a container locally will deploy and run on Amazon ECS without the need for any configuration changes. Windows Containers Compatibility Amazon ECS supports management of Windows containers. An Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides enhanced instance and container launch time performance and visibility into CPU, memory utilization, and reservation metrics. Local Development The Amazon ECS CLI allows you to simplify your local development experience as well as easily set up and run your containers on Amazon ECS. The Amazon ECS CLI supports Docker Compose, an open-source tool for defining and running multi-container applications. You can apply the same Compose definition used to define a multi-container application on your development machine as well as in production. The Amazon ECS CLI is open-source. Repository Support Amazon ECS can be used with any third-party hosted Docker image repository or accessible private Docker registry, such as Docker Hub and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). All you need to do is specify the repository in your task definition and Amazon ECS retrieves the appropriate images for your applications. Management Task Definitions Amazon ECS allows you to define tasks through a declarative JSON template called a Task Definition. Within a Task Definition you can specify one or more containers that are required for your task, including the Docker repository and image, memory and CPU requirements, shared data volumes, and how the containers are linked to each other. You can launch as many tasks as you want from a single Task Definition file that you can register with the service. Task Definition files also allow you to have version control over your application specification. Programmatic Control Amazon ECS provides you with a set of simple API actions to allow you to integrate and extend the service. The API actions allow you to create and delete clusters, register and deregister tasks, launch and terminate Docker containers, and provide detailed information about the state of your cluster and its instances. You can also use AWS CloudFormation to provision Amazon ECS clusters, register task definitions, and schedule containers. Container Deployments Amazon ECS allows you to easily update your containers to new versions. You can upload a new version of your application task definition, and the Amazon ECS scheduler automatically starts new containers using the updated image and stop containers running the previous version. Amazon ECS automatically registers and deregisters your containers from the associated Application Load Balancer. Blue/Green Deployments Blue/green deployments with AWS CodeDeploy help you minimize downtime during application updates. You can launch a new version of your Amazon ECS service alongside the old version and test the new version before you reroute traffic. You can also monitor the deployment process and rapidly rollback if there is an issue. Container Auto-Recovery The Amazon ECS will automatically recover unhealthy containers to ensure that you have the desired number of containers supporting your application. Scheduling Amazon ECS includes multiple scheduling strategies that place containers across your clusters based on your resource needs (for example, CPU or RAM) and availability requirements. Using the available scheduling strategies, you can schedule batch jobs, long-running applications and services, and daemon processes. Task Scheduling. Amazon ECS task scheduling allows you to run processes that perform work and then stop, such as batch processing jobs. Task scheduling can start tasks manually, automatically from a queue of jobs, or based on a time interval that you define. Service Scheduling. Amazon ECS service scheduling allows you to run stateless services and applications. This scheduling strategy ensures that a specified number of tasks are constantly running and restarts tasks if they fail. You can make sure that tasks are registered against an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer and can perform health checks that you define for your running tasks. Daemon Scheduling. Amazon ECS daemon scheduling automatically runs the same task on each selected instance in your ECS cluster. This makes it easy to run tasks that provide common management functionality for a service like logging, monitoring, or backups. Task Placement Amazon ECS allows you to customize how tasks are placed onto a cluster of EC2 instances based on built-in attributes such as instance type, Availability Zone, or custom attributes that you define. You can use attributes such as environment = production to label resources, use the list API actions to find those resources, and use the RunTask and CreateService API actions to schedule tasks on those resources. With Amazon ECS, you can also use placement strategies such as bin pack and spread to further define where tasks are placed. Policies can be chained together to achieve sophisticated placement capabilities without writing any code. Task placement policies are not utilized with the AWS Fargate Launch Type. Networking and Security Service Discovery Amazon ECS is integrated with AWS Cloud Map to make it easy for your containerized services to discover and connect with each other. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. With Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, and it maintains the updated location of these dynamically changing resources. This increases your application availability because your web service always discovers the most up-to-date locations of its resources. Service Mesh Service mesh makes it easy to build and run complex microservices applications by standardizing how every microservice in the application communicates. AWS App Mesh is a service that makes it easy to configure part of your application for end-to-end visibility and high-availability. To use App Mesh, add the Envoy proxy image to the ECS task definition. App Mesh manages Envoy configuration to provide service mesh capabilities. App Mesh exports metrics, logs, and traces to the endpoints specified in the Envoy bootstrap configuration provided. App Mesh provides an API to configure traffic routes, circuit breaking, retries, and other controls between microservices that are mesh-enabled. Task Networking Amazon Elastic Container Service supports Docker networking and integrates with Amazon VPC to provide isolation for containers. This gives you control over how containers connect with other services and external traffic. With Amazon ECS, you can choose between four networking modes for your containers that cater towards different use cases:

• Task Networking/awsvpc. This mode assigns each running ECS task a dedicated elastic networking interface, allowing containers full networking features in a VPC, just like EC2 instances.
• Bridge. This mode creates a Linux bridge that connects all containers running on the host in a local virtual network, which can be accessed through the host's default network connection.
• Host. This mode adds containers directly to the host’s network stack, exposing containers on the host's network with no isolation.
• None. This mode disables external networking for containers.

Load Balancing Amazon ECS is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing, allowing you to distribute traffic across your containers using Application Load Balancers or Network Load Balancers. You specify the task definition and the load balancer to use, and Amazon ECS automatically adds and removes containers from the load balancer. You can specify a dynamic port in the task definition, which gives your container an unused port when it is scheduled on an Amazon EC2 instance. You can also use path-based routing to share a load balancer with multiple services. Security Amazon ECS allows you to specify an IAM role for each ECS task. This allows the Amazon ECS container instances to have a minimal role, respecting the ‘least privilege’ access policy and allowing you to manage the instance role and the task role separately. You can also use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to gain visibility into the IAM role to which a task is assigned. Monitoring and Logging Monitoring Amazon ECS provides monitoring capabilities for your containers and clusters through Amazon CloudWatch. You can monitor average and aggregate CPU and memory utilization of running tasks as grouped by task definition, service, or cluster. You can also set CloudWatch alarms to alert you when your containers or clusters need to scale up or down. Logging Amazon ECS allows you to record all your Amazon ECS API calls and have the log files delivered to you through AWS CloudTrail. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by Amazon ECS. CloudTrail provides you a history of API calls made from the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and AWS CLI. It enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. PRICING: There are two different charge models for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Fargate Launch Type Model With Fargate, you pay for the amount of vCPU and memory resources that your containerized application requests. vCPU and memory resources are calculated from the time your container images are pulled until the Amazon ECS Task* terminates, rounded up to the nearest second. A minimum charge of 1 minute applies. EC2 Launch Type Model There is no additional charge for EC2 launch type. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. Why use Amazon ECS? Containers without servers Amazon ECS features AWS Fargate, so you can deploy and manage containers without having to provision or manage servers. With Fargate, you no longer have to select Amazon EC2 instance types, provision, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers or schedule containers to run on clusters and maintain their availability. Fargate enables you to focus on building and running applications, not the underlying infrastructure. Containerize Everything Amazon ECS lets you easily build all types of containerized applications, from long-running applications and microservices to batch jobs and machine learning applications. You can migrate legacy Linux or Windows applications from on-premises to the cloud and run them as containerized applications using Amazon ECS. Secure Amazon ECS launches your containers in your own Amazon VPC, allowing you to use your VPC security groups and network ACLs. No compute resources are shared with other customers. You can also assign granular access permissions for each of your containers using IAM to restrict access to each service and what resources a container can access. This high level of isolation helps you use Amazon ECS to build highly secure and reliable applications. Performance at Scale Amazon ECS is built on technology developed from many years of experience running highly scalable services. You can launch tens or tens of thousands of Docker containers in seconds using Amazon ECS with no additional complexity. AWS Integration Amazon ECS is deeply integrated with AWS services including Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon VPC, AWS IAM, Amazon ECR, AWS Batch, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeStar, and AWS CloudTrail. This gives you a complete solution for building and running a wide range of containerized applications. When to use Amazon ECS Microservices Amazon ECS helps you run microservices applications with native integration to AWS services and enables continuous integration and continuous deployment (CICD) pipelines. Batch Processing Amazon ECS lets you run batch workloads with managed or custom schedulers on Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. Application Migration to the Cloud Legacy enterprise applications can be containerized and easily migrated to Amazon ECS without requiring code changes. Machine Learning Amazon ECS makes it easy to containerize ML models for both training and inference. You can create ML models made up of loosely coupled, distributed services that can be placed on any number of platforms, or close to the data that the applications are analyzing.