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Components

The deployment of Docker containers to the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) involves several major components as follows:

  • Cluster – a logical grouping of container instances that you can place tasks on (see the next three), see Scheduling Amazon ECS Tasks
  • Task Definition – a description of an application that contains one or more container definitions, see Amazon ECS Task Definitions
  • Taskan instantiation of a task definition that is running on a container instance, see Amazon ECS Tasks 
  • Servicea scheduler that ensures that the specified number of tasks are constantly running and rescheduled on failure, and optionally registered against an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer, see Amazon ECS Services
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Workflow

The typical deployment workflow comprises two optional and one mandatory phases:

(Optional) Create an ECS Cluster and ECS Container Instances

An ECS cluster is the target environment to deploy Docker containers to. If you have explored ECS already, you might have a Default cluster available already in your AWS account. If you do not have one ore more clusters provisioned already, or if you want to isolate the additional containers in a separate cluster, you might need to create one first, which can be achieved in various ways, for example:

(Optional) Build and push a Docker image to a Docker registry

Your are going to deploy a Docker container based on a Docker image. This image might exist already, or you might want to create it during the build. The latter can be achieved with the Docker task in Bamboo (available as of Bamboo 5.8), which allows you to:

Deploy a Docker image to ECS

This is the main and mandatory activity for using Amazon ECS. The three main options for deploying Docker containers to ECS are described in Scheduling Amazon ECS Tasks and available within Tasks for AWS accordingly:

  • Register a task definition - all three of the following task scheduling options require an available Amazon ECS Task Definition, which can be registered with the Amazon ECS Task Definition task
  • Start a task - this is provided by the Start Task action of the Amazon ECS Task task

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    titleAdvanced option for leveraging custom schedulers

    In addition to providing a set of default schedulers, Amazon ECS also allows you to write your own schedulers that meet the needs of your business, or leverage third party schedulers. The ECSSchedulerDriver is an open source proof of concept that shows you how can integrate Amazon ECS with third-party schedulers; in this case, with the open source Apache Mesos framework. To write your own scheduler, you can use the Amazon ECS List and Describe actions to get the state of your cluster and then use the StartTask action to place your tasks on the appropriate container instance based on your business and application requirements. The StartTask action is available in the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or the Amazon ECS API. For more information, see StartTask in the Amazon EC2 Container Service API Reference 

Alternative workflow via CloudFormation

A typical workflow based on CloudFormation might look as follows:

  1. (optional) create/update the CloudFormation stack that provisions the ECS cluster and ECS container instances – see the Create Stack action of the AWS CloudFormation Stack task
  2. create/update the CloudFormation stack that provisions the ECS task definition and service – see the Create Stack action of the AWS CloudFormation Stack task

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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