Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a performant and scalable container management and orchestration service available in the public AWS cloud. It supports running your containers in AWS Fargate or using customizable Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS is also able to integrate seamlessly with other AWS services.
Among the many deployment models you can use with Amazon ECS, blue/green deployments, which allow gated deployments with no downtime, are supported.
In this lab, you will use the AWS Management Console to build Docker images and deploy them using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:
- Use AWS CodeBuild to create Docker images and place them in Amazon ECR
- Create an Amazon ECS cluster
- Create Amazon ECS task definitions and services
- Switch from one deployed application to another quickly and with no downtime
Intended Audience
- Candidates for the AWS Developer Associate certification
- DevOps Engineers
- Cloud Architects
- Software Engineers
Prerequisites
Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
- AWS CodeBuild
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
- Docker
The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:
- Compute Fundamentals For AWS
- Working with AWS CodeBuild
- Introduction to Docker
- Using Elastic Load Balancing & EC2 Auto Scaling to Support AWS Workloads
Updates
March 13th, 2024 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI
September 1st, 2023 - Resolved ECS cluster issue
August 15th, 2023 - Resolved task deployment issue
July 10th, 2023 - Resolved intermittent CodeBuild failure
May 22nd, 2023 - Resolved an issue that caused the lab to fail to setup on rare occasions
May 17th, 2023 - Resolved issue with ECSTaskExecution Role
May 3rd, 2023 - Resolved target group issue
April 12th, 2023 - Resolved environment error
March 8th, 2023 - Updated screenshots and instructions to reflect latest UI
February 23rd, 2023 - Addressed an issue with cluster creation instructions
February 17th, 2023 - Updated lab to use aws/codebuild/standard:6.0 image
January 25th, 2023 - Updated the lab for the new Amazon ECS console
January 10th, 2023 - Updated screenshots to reflect the latest UI
May 3rd, 2022 - Updated lab step to improve clarity and user experience
March 18th, 2022 - Updated step 3 to 7 with more/clear screenshots and added instructions
December 27th, 2021 - Updated screenshots and instructions to reflect the latest UI
December 14th, 2021 - Corrected the name of the S3 bucket name referred to in the CodeBuild project
August, 9th, 2021 - Updated the AWS CodeBuild lab step to reflect the latest user interface changes and clarified some instructions
October 29th, 2020 - Addressed an issue that prevented the ECS services from starting
July 30th, 2020 - Increased time limit based on student feedback
March 5th, 2020 - Added a new lab step that instructs you to remove resources from the lab
May 30th, 2019 - Added a new validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab in more detail
May 24th, 2019 - Updated CodeBuild instructions and buildspec.yaml to work with the new standard Docker image
January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab
July 18th, 2018 - Updated screenshots and instructions to match the new Console experience
Environment before
Environment after
Eric is a Lab Researcher and Developer working to add to Cloud Academy's library of hands-on labs. He is an IT veteran who enjoys the ever-changing landscape of cloud computing. He also relishes live classical music performances, because sometimes engineering is better heard than seen.