AWS ECS - Ways to deploy containers - amazon-web-services

Question

The use case is like - developer makes some code changes and the below things happen automatically -
build runs, application artifact created, docker image generated with the artifact, image pushed to Docker registry, AWS ECS tasks and ECS services updated.
I want to know what are the ways to achieve the above automation of update of AWS ECS services. Till now I have implemented AWS ECS update from Jenkins build using -
1>run post build AWS CLi scripts from Jenkins to update ECS
2>post build action or pipeline step to invoke AWS Lambda function. I have created one Lambda function in Java to implement that.
Please let me the other ways we can achieve the above. Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm continuously deploying Docker containers from CircleCI to AWS ECS.
The outline of the deployment flow is as follows:
Build and tag a new Docker image
Login to AWS ECR and push the image
Update task definitions and services of ECS with ecs-deploy
ecs-deploy is a useful script that updates Docker images in ECS.
https://github.com/silinternational/ecs-deploy

Answer 2

You could use a shell script that calls aws cli commands to create cloudformation stacks or directly call the create commands in the aws cli for the ECR repository, Task Definition, Events rule and target(for scheduling).
then you just call this script on your terminal using this command: ./setup.sh and it should execute all your commands at once.
aws ecr create-repository \
--repository-name tasks-${TASK_NAME}-${TASK_ENV} \
;
or if you want to set up your resources via cloudformation templates, you can launch them using this command as long as the template exists at file://name.yml:
aws cloudformation create-stack \
--stack-name stack-name \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
--template-body file://name.yml \
--parameters
ParameterKey=ParamName,ParameterValue=${PARAM_NAME} \
;

Answer 3

Take a look at Codefresh - https://docs.codefresh.io/docs/amazon-ecs
You can build your pipeline
Build Step
Push to Registry
Deply to ECS
That easy

Answer 4

While there are a ton of CI/CD tools out there, since I am early in my rollout, I decided to write a small script instead of having CI/CD pipelines do it.
Here is a one-click deploy script I wrote using the ecs-deploy script as a dependency to achieve a rolling deploy of a docker image to ECS.
You can run this locally from your dev or build/deployment box or use Jenkins or some local build tool.
#!/bin/bash
# automatically login to AWS
eval $(aws ecr get-login)
# build local docker image and push repo to AWS
docker build -t <yourlocaldockerimagetag> .
docker tag <yourlocaldockerimagetag>:latest <yourECSRepoURL>:latest
docker -D -l debug push <yourECSRepoURL>:latest
# deploy to ECS
ecs-deploy/ecs-deploy -m 50 -k <access-key> -s <secret-key> -r <aws-region> -c <cluster-name> -n <service-name> -i <yourECSRepoURL>:latest
Parameters:
cluster-name: Your cluster name in ECS
service-name: Your service name that you had created in ECS
yourECSRepoURL: ECS Repository URL
yourlocaldockerimagetag: Any local image tag name
access-key: your AWS access key for deployments
secret-key: your AWS secret key
Make sure you install ecs-deploy before this script.
The -m 50 tells it that it can deploy even if the number of nodes drops to 50%. Ideally you would have an extra node to do deployments, but if you can't afford that setting this would ensure that deployments continue to happen.
If you are also using an ELB (load balancer), then the default deregistration delay for target groups is 5 minutes which is a bit excessive. The deregistration delay is the time to wait for existing requests to complete BEFORE ECS sends a SIGTERM or SIGINT to your docker container. You should lower this by going to the Target Groups in EC2 dashboard and click the Edit Attributes to edit it. Otherwise your deployments may take forever.

Answer 5

I think nobody has mentioned CodePipeline from AWS, it really integrates easilly with many AWS Services including ECS and CodeCommit:
Push commit to CodeCommit Repo, triggering the pipeline execution.
(Optional) Configure a Manual Approval step that needs you to take an action before Build.
Run a CodeBuild Project that builds your Dockerfile and push the image to an ECR Repo.
Run a "Deploy" step that deploys to a specific ECS Service. It updates the services with a new Task Definition that points to the new ECR Image.
I have used this flow with BitBucket also, just configure a BitBucket pipeline that pushes all new code to a CodeCommit Repo as a previous step.

Answer 6

Exactly as #minamiyojo and #astav answers, we ended up glueing ecs-deploy with a template engine to power up our CD pipeline with some reusable component, we just open-sourced as well:
https://github.com/GuccioGucci/yoke
Please refer to Motivation section in README, hope this would help your scenario too.