ECS Cluster

Build an Amazon Elastic Container Services Cluster with Terraform to deploy an test application

Requirements

• An AWS account and an IAM user with permissions to create AWS resources

• terraform v0.11.14

• provider.aws v2.45.0

• docker 19.03.5

• aws-cli 1.16.240

Introduction

This will create an ECS cluster, made up of a set of three nodes in an auto-scaling group across the three availability zones specified and deploys the application.

in a nutshell, it has..

• VPC with Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, Public and Private subnets
• ECS Cluster in with EC2 type - nodes inside private subnet and attached with autoscaling group
• Service deployed in ECS with auto-scaling
• Private S3 bucket and ECS tasks allowed to write to it.
• Application Loadbalancer in-front of the application

Usage - To run the code,

Export IAM credentials as environment variables unless you are using AWS roles

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="accesskey"
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="secretkey"
$ export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-east-1"

Build the nginx image with custom port

Create Repository in AWS ECR (for storing the custom nginx image)

$ aws ecr create-repository --repository-name nginx

Note down the repositoryUri from the output

Build the docker images with two available artifact versions

cd nginx/
docker build . -t <repositoryUri>:tag

Example:

docker build . -t xxxxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nginx:latest

Push the docker images to ECR (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/docker-push-ecr-image.html)

1. Login into ECR

   Example: eval $(aws ecr get-login --no-include-email --region us-east-1 | sed 's|https://||')

2. Push the images built

   Example: docker push xxxxxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nginx:latest

Note: If you have authentication issues while pushing, try login with the help of https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-ecr-credential-helper

If you still have troubles, you can use my public image : vineethvijay/nginx-custom-port:latest ;)

Running the Terraform,

Change the image under terraform/files/nginx-task.json

cd terraform/
terraform init

terraform plan
terraform apply

Access the nginx page with the output endpoint (it may take couple of seconds..) You may also check the in AWS ECS service console to see whether the tasks are in RUNNING state, also the Target Group to see if the listeners are healthy.