ECS deploy

ECS Deploy is a REST API server written in Go that can be used to deploy services on ECS from anywhere. It typically is executed as part of your deployment pipeline. Continuous Integration software (like Jenkins, CircleCI, Bitbucket or others) often don't have proper integration with ECS. This API server can be deployed on ECS and will be used to provide continuous deployment on ECS.

• Registers services in DynamoDB
• Creates ECR repository
• Creates necessary IAM roles
• Creates ALB target and listener rules
• Creates and updates ECS Services based on json/yaml input
• SAML supported Web UI to redeploy/rollback versions, add/update/delete parameters, examine event/container logs, scale, and run manual tasks
• Support to scale out and scale in ECS Container Instances

The UI

Usage

Download

You can download ecs-deploy and ecs-client from the releases page or you can use the image from dockerhub.

Bootstrap ECS cluster

You can bootstrap a new ECS cluster using ecs-deploy. It'll setup a autoscaling group, ALB, IAM roles, and the ECS cluster.

./ecs-deploy --bootstrap \
  --alb-security-groups sg-123456 \
  --cloudwatch-logs-enabled \
  --cloudwatch-logs-prefix mycompany \
  --cluster-name mycluster \
  --ecs-desired-size 1 \
  --ecs-max-size 1 \
  --ecs-min-size 1 \
  --ecs-security-groups sg-123456 \
  --ecs-subnets subnet-123456 \
  --environment staging \
  --instance-type t2.micro \
  --key-name mykey \
  --loadbalancer-domain cluster.in4it.io \
  --paramstore-enabled \
  --paramstore-kms-arn aws:arn:kms:region:accountid:key/1234 \
  --paramstore-prefix mycompany \
  --profile your-aws-profile \
  --region your-aws-region

You'll need to setup the security groups and VPC/subnets first. The ALB security group should allow port 80 and 443 incoming, the ECS security group should allow 32768:61000 from the ALB.

If you no longer need the cluster, you can remove it by specifying --delete-cluster instead of --bootstrap

Bootstrap with terraform

Alternatively you can use terraform to deploy the ecs cluster. See terraform/README.md for a terraform module that spins up an ecs cluster.

Deploy to ECS Cluster

To deploy the examples (an nginx server and a echoserver), use ecs-client:

Login interactively:

./ecs-client login --url http://yourdomain/ecs-cluster

Login with environment variables:

ECS_DEPLOY_LOGIN=deploy ECS_DEPLOY_PASSWORD=password ./ecs-client login --url http://yourdomain/ecs-cluster

Deploy:

./ecs-client deploy -f examples/services/multiple-services/multiple-services.yaml

Configuration (Environment variables)

AWS Specific variables:

• AWS_REGION=region # mandatory

Authentication variables;

• JWT_SECRET=secret # mandatory
• DEPLOY_PASSWORD=deploy # mandatory
• DEVELOPER_PASSWORD=developer # mandatory

Service specific variables

These will be used when deploying services

• AWS_ACCOUNT_ENV=dev|staging|testing|qa|prod
• PARAMSTORE_ENABLED=yes
• PARAMSTORE_PREFIX=mycompany
• PARAMSTORE_KMS_ARN=
• CLOUDWATCH_LOGS_ENABLED=yes
• CLOUDWATCH_LOGS_PREFIX=mycompany
• LOADBALANCER_DOMAIN=mycompany.com

DynamoDB specific variables

• DYNAMODB_TABLE=Services

ECR

• ECR_SCAN_ON_PUSH=true

SAML

SAML can be enabled using the following environment variables

• SAML_ENABLED=yes
• SAML_ACS_URL=https://mycompany.com/url-prefix
• SAML_CERTIFICATE=contents of your certificate
• SAML_PRIVATE_KEY=contents of your private key
• SAML_METADATA_URL=https://identity-provider/metadata.xml

To create a new key and certificate, the following openssl command can be used:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout myservice.key -out myservice.cert -days 3650 -nodes -subj "/CN=myservice.mycompany.com"

Web UI

• PARAMSTORE_ASSUME_ROLE=arn # arn to assume when querying the parameter store

Autoscaling (down and up)

Setup

• Create an SNS topic, add https subscriber with URL https://your-domain.com/ecs-deploy/webhook
• Create a CloudWatch Event for ECS tasks/services
• Create an EC2 Auto Scaling Lifecycle hook, and a CloudWatch event to capture the Lifecycle hook
• Let the SNS topic be the trigger for the CloudWatch events

Usage

• Autoscaling (up) will be triggered when the largest container (in respect to mem/cpu) cannot be scheduled on the cluster
• Autoscaling (down) will be triggered when there is enough capacity available on the cluster to remove an instance (instance size + largest container + buffer)

Configuration

The defaults are set for the most common use cases, but can be changed by setting environment variables:

Autoscaling Strategies