This document outlines an ECS workshop agenda that covers: continuous delivery using infrastructure as code; containerizing services; deploying to ECS and maintaining uptime; platform thinking for infrastructure as code; ECS service and cluster scaling; blue/green deployments; and demos of cluster updates, multiple environments, and on-demand environments. The workshop teaches development of microservices like an Asgard portal with Odin and Thor gods, containerizing the services, deploying to ECS, and scaling the cluster and services. It addresses shortcomings of the initial solution and introduces platform thinking to provision clusters and services together in an adaptive, disposable way.

1. ECS Workshop
- Prashant Kalkar, Kaushik
Chandrashekar

2. Agenda
● Good design - Continuous delivery and Infrastructure as code.
● Continuous integration & Containerizing services.
● Deployment on ECS & deployment uptime.
● Platform thinking for IAC.
● ECS Service scaling.
● ECS Cluster scaling - challenges and solutions.
● (Demo) Cluster updates & service uptime.
● (Demo) Multiple environments and on-demand environments.
● Blue green deployments.

3. Design Objectives
On-demand
Self-service
Disposable
Consistent
Services available continuously

4. Tools you need
● Git
● Git bash (for windows only)
● Github account (with SSH key configured)
● Virtualbox
● Vagrant
● IntelliJ Idea or Eclipse.

5. Development Setup
● Fork workshop repository and clone on local machine.
● Login to aws and download access key csv.
● Generate Github token. (refer here)
● Copy and populate workshop_config.template to your user home.
● Build vagrant image.
● Ssh into vagrant
● Upload vagrant github ssh key to your github account.

6. Setup your Jenkins
● Build Jenkins docker image.
● Publish jenkins image.
● Terraform for IAC.
● Build infrastructure (provision jenkins).

7. Example details - Asgard Portal
Provides information about Asgard and its Gods - Odin & Thor.
A microservice will be deployed for every God.
We will have fun deploying these services.

8. Containerizing Odin
Exercise 0 - Create service build pipeline.

9. Infrastructure for ECS

10. Exercise 1 - ECS Cluster + EC2 Instance

12. ECS Infrastructure
Exercise 2 - ECS Cluster + ASG
Exercise 3 - Route53 + ALB + ECS Cluster + ASG

13. ALB Structure

14. Service Deployment
Exercise 4 - Odin service deployment on the ECS cluster.
Exercise 5 - Thor service deployment on ECS cluster.

15. Shortcomings of CD solution till now
Deployment pipelines per service - Issue if there are many services.
Provisioning a fully functional cluster will take time as all services have to be
deployed.
Different services with different needs (CPU/Memory) will need frequent change
to cluster.
Provisioning a new environment will require a new pipeline per service.

16. Platform Thinking
Solution that is adaptive.
Cluster owns the services.
Provisioning and restoring a cluster provisions the services.
Uniform way of mapping cluster and services.

17. Exercise 6
Adaptive Cluster & Service Mapping

18. Container Scaling
Exercise 7 - Target tracking based on service memory.

19. Cluster Scaling
ECS is responsible for container scaling
ASG responsible for instance scaling
We need a way to scale cluster as containers are scaling.
Scaling speed mismatch between EC2 and ECS.

20. Ahead of time Cluster Scaling
Ref: https://engineering.depop.com/ahead-of-time-scheduling-on-ecs-ec2-d4ef124b1d9e

21. Exercise 8 - Cluster scaling
Add auto scaling policies and alarms to scale cluster
Try out certain scenarios.

22. Cluster Updates
ASG rolling updates - Demo.
Instance draining during cluster updates.

24. Draining lambda.
Demo

25. Blue green deployment

27. Cons
This design requires new ALB and clusters for running different version of the
services.
DNS might require some time to propagate change (TTL time)
Misbehaving client might still send traffic to old load balancer even after switch
is complete.

28. Final Thoughts
ECS can provide path to transition to containerization.
Think platform and service team.
Let containers scale early.
Treat everything Disposable.
Adapt On-Demand and Self-Service model.

29. References & Credits
Ahead of time cluster scaling
https://engineering.depop.com/ahead-of-time-scheduling-on-ecs-ec2-
d4ef124b1d9e
How to Automate Container Instance Draining in Amazon ECS
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/how-to-automate-container-instance-
draining-in-amazon-ecs/

30. Feedback
Please submit feedback form so that we can improve further
http://bit.ly/et18-ws-ecs

31. Thank You!
Questions?