Notes on Amazon ECS
Published: 2018-01-30 | tags: (none)
Here are some notes I’ve taken while reading Building Blocks of Amazon ECS.
Regions and Availability Zones (AZs)
AWS is divided into regions. - They are geographically separated - Each consists of multiple isolated data centers.
A region is divided into (≥ 2) Availability Zones. - AZs are isolated from each other, but inter-connected via fast network connections. - One AZ can span more data centers. Common failures in one AZ don’t affect other AZs in the same region, making outages of a whole region more rare.
To get more availability, deploy a service over multiple AZs.
Containers
A container virtualizes an operating system, while a Virtual Machine virtualizes physical hardware. This means that a container is not a VM.
A (container) image is a package that groups - the code of the application we want to run - and all the application’s dependencies
Images can be deployed on any host machine. The container takes care of the communication with the host.
ECS allows running containerized applications on a cluster of EC2 instances (that are the containers’ hosts). ECS works natively with Docker containers.
Container instances
An ECS instance is a special EC2 instance that - runs an ECS container agent - has an IAM policy and role (IAM is Amazon’s identity management system) - is registered into our ECS cluster
An ECS task is a group of containers. They logically belong together in order to make up an application/system. Tasks are not created directly, but through a task definition, that declares which containers belong to the task.
The ECS container agent is a program that handles communication between the (ECS) scheduler (the component that manages the ECS tasks) and the ECS instances. The ECS scheduler decides on which instance a container runs, according to some user-specifiable constraints.
An ECS cluster is a group of container instances inside a region (but possibly, and preferably, across multiple AZs).
To register an instance in a cluster, the instance needs an agent running.
Services
A service is a way of automating the concept of what to run. Conceptually, it looks like: “I want N tasks, defined by task definition D”. This recipe is processed by the ECS infrastructure, that makes sure that those tasks are running, possibly restarting them if they go down.