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

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
  • Using built-in Route53 service discovery
  • Using DNS
  • Using Consul
  • Using Weaveworks
  • Using linkerd
  • Using HAProxy
• Service Mesh
  • AWS App Mesh
  • Consul Connect
  • Linkerd 1.x
• Data Persistance
  • Using Amazon Elastic File System
• Secrets Management
  • Using Parameter Store and IAM Roles for Tasks
  • Using ECS Task roles for managing AWS credentials
  • The right way to store secrets using Parameter Store
  • Open source tool for automatically getting secrets from SSM into your docker environment
• Administration
  • Automatically draining cluster instances before termination
  • Monitor cluster state with Cloudwatch event stream
  • React to ECS events such as crashed containers using a serverless function
  • Run an ECS Task on every cluster instance
  • Accessing Rails console inside of an ECS task
• CI/CD
  • AWS CodePipeline
  • Atlassian Bamboo
  • JetBrains TeamCity
  • Lambda
  • CircleCI
  • Shippable
  • Gitlab
  • SemaphoreCI
• CI/CD mechanics:
  • Rolling blue/green deploy in place
  • Canary Deploy
  • Isolated Regression Testing
• 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