Tips and Tricks for Running Container Workloads on AWS by Abby Fuller

1. Tips and tricks for running
container workloads on AWS
Abby Fuller, Sr Technical Evangelist, AWS
@abbyfuller

2. Agenda
• Let’s talk microservices
• Orchestration choices on AWS
• Amazon EC2 Container Service
• Kubernetes
• Deployments
• Community builders!

3. Let’s talk microservices

4. What are microservices?
“Service-oriented architecture
composed of
loosely coupled elements
that have
bounded contexts”
-Adrian Cockcroft (VP of Cloud Architecture @ AWS, former Cloud Architect at
Netflix)

5. A couple of general best practices
• Rely on the public API
• Use the right tool for the job
• Secure your services
• Be a good microservices citizen
• Organizational changes matters
• Automate where plausible

6. How do I deploy my containers to hosts?
How do I do zero downtime or blue green deployments?
How do I keep my containers alive?
How can my containers talk to each other?
How do I do service discovery?
What about secrets?
How do I best optimize my "pool of compute”?

7. Containers are awesome
….but they’re more work

8. How can you (but mostly me) do less work?
#thoughtleadership

9. Answer! Tools. More specifically, orchestration tools.

10. Orchestration choices on AWS

11. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon EC2 Container Service
• Highly scaleable, high
performance container
management system.
• Eliminates the need to install,
operate and scale your own
container management system.

12. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon ECS
• ECS provides a managed platform for:
Cluster management Container orchestration Deep AWS integration

13. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Kubernetes
• Container orchestration
platform that manages
containers across your
infrastructure in logical groups
• Rich API to integrate 3rd parties
• Open Source

14. Who uses what?
Amazon ECS Kubernetes on AWS

15. Bottom line: we want to be the best place
to run your containers, however you want
to do it.

16. Tips and tricks for getting the most out of
your deployments

17. Beware points of failure
• Source/version control all the things
• e.g. git and AWS CodeCommit, registries
• Smart image tagging
• Shared dependencies
• Deploy fast and often (and small!)
• For Kubernetes: fault tolerance requires an extra step! Make
sure you have tolerance for failure, and use autoscaling
groups.

18. Smaller images mean faster builds and
deploys
• Go smaller
• Private image repository
• e.g. Amazon ECR
• Shared where possible
• Avoid unnecessary add-ons CACHE

19. Alerts are (mostly) good
• Alert responsibly
• Take advantage of the built-in AWS alert systems
• e.g. aws-log driver or CloudWatch
• Put checks or limits on services or clusters scaling
• Log sorting for severity is important to avoid unnecessarily
sending an alert

20. Monitoring and logging are key
• Utilize tools
• e.g. AWS CloudWatch, Datadog
• Logging for both containers and hosts
• Avoid unnecessary noise here too:
• Log levels!
• Meaningful log messages (don’t just log the default)
• Logs should actually help

21. Automation where plausible
• Scripts!
• Utilize built-in AWS features
• e.g. CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy
• …but add checks by a human
• Templates and tools are your friends!
• CloudFormation, etc: use tools to help setup and
create repeatable infrastructure

22. Maximize your resources
• Set sensible resource limits
• Use a scaling policy to scale up or down and preclude
resources from running idle
• Utilize TaskPlacement policies

23. The right tools for the job
• ALB vs ELB
• Not all languages need to build the same
• Set Service level scaling policies, plus cluster scaling policies
• Regardless of orchestration tool, use a VPC!
• Multi AZ
• Bottom line: use what works for you!

24. Checking for issues
• Debugging
• Monitor performance with tools like X-Ray
• Connection draining settings
• Health checks
• Check for actual health
• Look for number of failed checks before declaring
unhealthy

25. Help is out there

26. Buzzfeed and Rig

27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide

28. coldbrew-cli

29. AWSome ECS

30. kubernetes/kops

31. Kris Nova’s kubicorn

32. Heptio and Kubernetes quick start for AWS