A curated list of guides, development tools, and resources for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). This list includes both community created content as well as content created by AWS.
Do you prefer video instead? If so check out Containers from the Couch for videos on all things AWS + containers.
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First steps
- The Hitchhikers Guide to AWS ECS and Docker by J. Cole Morrison - Introduction to AWS ECS concepts
- Building Blocks of Amazon ECS - Learn about the basic building blocks of ECS and how they fit together to fully understand how it works and how you can use it!
- ECS Workshop - A detailed workshop that guides you through creating a simple microservice deployment, load testing it, and monitoring it.
- AWS Copilot - The getting started guide for AWS Copilot helps you deploy your first simple static website container on Fargate.
Pick your container hosting strategy:
- AWS Fargate - AWS Fargate allows you to launch containers directly using the ECS API, without having to manage any EC2 servers. You are billed for the amount of CPU and memory you provisioned for the container.
- Self managed EC2 - For really large deployments running your own cluster of EC2 instances to host your containers gives you the most control over price and configuration. You are billed for the underlying EC2 instance as long as it runs, no matter whether it was running containers or not, so it is your responsibility to keep those EC2 instances busy if you want to be cost efficient.
- Capacity providers - ECS capacity providers automatically launch and stop EC2 instances on your account so you always have enough capacity to run your containers.
- ECS Anywhere - You can connect ECS to your own on-premise datacenter or machine and ECS can use it as capacity to run your tasks
Pick a tool for deploying your application
- AWS Copilot - The easiest starting experience for launching your local container on Fargate. This commandline tool helps you build and deploy your application, as well as deploy CI/CD pipelines that automatically rebuild and redeploy your application on Git push. It creates infrastructure as code templates for you behind the scenes.
- AWS Cloud Development Kit - AWS CDK is an SDK that lets developers define and deploy AWS infrastructure using familiar programming languages, often the same language that the application itself is coded in. CDK creates CloudFormation automatically behind the scenes.
- aws-ecs - This module provides simple low level constructs for creating ECS and Fargate services. It gets about 100k downloads per week on NPM, so it is quite popular as a choice.
- aws-ecs-patterns - A more beginner friendly interface to CDK. These patterns help you setup simple things like a "load balanced service" or a "scheduled task"
- ecs-service-extensions - This CDK module provides the most extendable interface for ECS services. It lets you deploy an ECS service and then optionally attach extensions to it, which do things like add the service to a service mesh, or add an observability sidecar, etc.
- Docker Compose - If you use Docker Compose to launch your containers locally it now has an integration to deploy containers directly to ECS.
- CloudFormation - You can choose to write CloudFormation templates to describe your deployment directly, in which case these sample templates will help.
- Terraform ECS by Armin Coralic - Production ready AWS ECS infrastructure as code with Terraform
- Troposphere + ECS - For Python users Troposphere can help create CloudFormation templates. This example shows how to create an ECS deployment using Troposphere
Older tools
The following tools may not be as up-to-date or maintained, but are retained here for reference:
- ECS CLI v1 - The original CLI for ECS is designed to be mostly compatible with Docker Compose. It turns a local Docker Compose file into a remote deployment.
- fargate - Command line tool for interacting with AWS Fargate. With just a single command you can build, push, and launch your container in Fargate, orchestrated by ECS.
- fargate-create - A CLI tool for creating new projects based on Terraform templates and Fargate CLI. Supported stacks:
- mu - Automates everything relating to ECS devops and CI/CD. This framework lets you write a simple metadata file and it constructs all the infrastructure you need so that you can deploy to ECS by simply pushing to your Git repo.
- deployfish - Write a simplified
deployfish.ymlfile describing your deployment and let this tool handle the heavy lifting of deploying your service. - Airship Terraform for ECS
- CloudFormation reference architecture - An older CloudFormation reference architecture for ECS
- Cloudonaut CloudFormation templates
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- empire - Control layer on top of ECS that provides a Heroku like workflow
- broadside - Ruby based command line tool for deploying to ECS
- UFO - Ruby based tool for building containers and shipping them to ECS
- bash deployment script by Justin Kulesza
- pnzr - Go based tool for building and pushing to ECS, also has integraton with AWS KMS for secrets management.
- deplojo - Python based deployment tool using ECS
- convox - Easily build, deploy and scale applications on ECS
- ecsctl - Open source tool similar to Kubernetes
kubectlfor ECS. - ecs-deploy - Simple but powerful tool for initiating automatic blue green deploys on ECS
- ecspresso - Minimalistic: JSON file goes in, service launches
- ecsrun - Easily run one-off tasks against an ECS Task Definition using a config file based approach.
- shipctl - Tool that supports deploying a task on ECS, rolling back, or just running a one-off task
- ecsdeploy - A client and simplified web interface for managing your ECS cluster, rolling out and rolling back application versions
- ecs-service - CLI tool for deploying to ECS using CloudFormation with support for .env files for environment specific configuration of your containers
- kms-env - CLI tool for managing secrets using AWS KMS in .env files which can be used in conjunction with ecs-service to supply secrets to your containers
- ecsq - A developer friendly tool for querying the state of an ECS cluster
- Wonqa is a tool for spinning up disposable QA environments in AWS Fargate, with SSL enabled by Let's Encrypt. More details about Wonqa on the Wonder Engineering blog.
Courses
- Free
- ECS Workshop - Learn how to deploy a 3 tier, polyglot, microservice based application to AWS Fargate
- Cloudskills: The beginners guide to running Docker containers on AWS
- Simplilearn: AWS ECS Tutorial
- Paid
- Microservices with Docker, Flask, and React - Learn how to build, test, and deploy microservices powered by Docker, Flask, and React on Amazon ECS!
- AWS Developer: Optimizing on AWS - Learn how you can optimize your applications on AWS with Amazon ECS!
- Udemy: ECS Deep Dive
- Cloud Academy: Introduction to ECS
- Coursera: Building Containerized Applications on AWS
Solutions
- Service Discovery
- Service Mesh
- Data Persistance
- Secrets Management
- Administration
- CI/CD
- CI/CD mechanics:
- Open source:
- Watchbot - This tool by Mapbox helps you run data processing across an ECS cluster in response to external events
- ecs-export - A tool for exporting ECS cluster metrics to Prometheus for advanced querying
- docker-elk-ecs - Connecting Amazon ECS container logs to an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack
- Sample task definitions - Sample task definitions for running applications like Nginx, Tomcat, Gunicorn, Wildfly, Kibana, and Jetty as containers under Amazon ECS
Reference Architectures
- ECS Microservices Orchestration - Automated deployment for complete ECS Fargate Cluster using Terraform. This template provide features like Service Discovery with Cloudmap, Autoscaling, Container Insights, Workers, Scheduled tasks, Public and Private Services, Blue/Green deployment, ALB routing and CI/CD using CodePipeline and CodeBuild.
- Sock shop microservices demo on Amazon ECS
- Node.js Microservices
- Java Microservices on AWS ECS
- Swift ECS Workshop
- NGINX Reverse Proxy sidecar container on AWS ECS
- Deploying a Deep Learning Framework on ECS
- Powering your Amazon ECS Cluster with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
- Reactive Microservices Architectures with Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon DynamoDB
- Cats n' Dogs - A fun workshop that covers service and container-instance auto-scaling, spot-fleet integration, container placement strategies, service discovery, secrets management with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, among other things.
Blogs
- Run a PHP application on AWS Fargate - An in-depth guide to run a Laravel app on AWS Fargate with Github Actions for deployment
- Deploying a Rails app to Fargate - Step by step walkthrough of deploying a Ruby + RDS app, with helpful debugging tips
- How to use AWS Fargate and Lambda for long-running processes in a Serverless app - Great tutorial showing how to leverage the power of long running docker containers in Fargate alongside Lambda. Example application processes video files to extract thumbnails using just S3, Lambda, and Fargate... no EC2.
- Setting up service discovery for AWS Fargate using CloudFormation
- Using the Clair image scanner with Fargate, ECR and CodeBuild/CodePipeline
- A lighter way to deploy to ECS/Fargate - combining update-service/task data from several sources including metadata of the docker image itself to deploy new versions.
- Chaos testing with ECS - Chaos toolkit supports ECS as a target for chaos engineering
- Private subnets tutorial
- End-to-end TLS traffic - How to setup end-to-end TLS from client to container, as well as from container to container
- Docker for .NET Developers
Presentations
- Running your Dockerized application(s) on AWS EC2 Container Service by Marco Pas
- Microservices on AWS with Weaveworks
- Running a Virtual World via ECS - Linden Labs on their usage of ECS
- Advanced Task Scheduling with AWS ECS
- Instacart on running microservices on Amazon ECS
- Building Next-Generation Applications with Amazon ECS - How Meteor Built Galaxy on Amazon ECS
- Amazon ECS at Coursera: A General Purpose Microservice
Customer stories
- Airtime - Microservice Continuous Integration Made Easy with AWS ECS
- Segment - Rebuilding Our Infrastructure with Docker, ECS, and Terraform
- Nextdoor - How Nextdoor made a 10x improvement in release times with Docker and Amazon ECS
- MapBox - We switched to Amazon ECS and you won't believe what happened next
- Jimdo - Container Based Crons
- Wrapp - On how EC2 Container service simplified our infrastructure stack
- Docker on AWS: from containerization to orchestration
- Deploying Distributed Stateful Applications on ECS - Akka Cluster as an example
- Migration of our video encoder to AWS - How and why Pornhub moved massive amounts of video encoding from Mesos to an autoscaling ECS cluster on AWS
- Realtor - A Better ECS