dgokcin/aws-ecs-exercise

aws-ecs-exercise

Task

Configuring an end to end deployment pipeline on AWS that manages the lifecycle of a web application.

Tech Stack

• flask: Flask is a popular, extensible web microframework for building web applications with Python.

  Due to its simplicity, I used Flask to develop the simple web application. The web application is serving on port 5000 and it justs prints a hello message to the page.

• GitHub Actions: GitHub Actions can orchestrate any workflow, based on any event, while GitHub manages the execution, provides rich feedback, and secures every step along the way.

  When looking for an easy way to deploy onto ECS, I saw a workflow online which was maintained by aws-actions and decided to use it for my CI/CD pipeline

• Amazon CodeBuild: AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.

  In my setup, I used CodeBuild as an environment for executing my dummy unit test. Depending of the status of the tests, by using webhooks, codebuild can report the status of the tests back to GitHub.

• Amazon ECS: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to operate containerized workloads at scale. It also integrates with other core AWS services, such as Amazon Route 53, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon CloudWatch. Establishing an effective and efficient CI/CD pipeline is critical for containerized applications, regardless of the platform you are using to manage your containers.

  Since it was included in the free-tier, I used it in my stack.

• Amazon ECR: Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully managed container registry that makes it easy to store, manage, share, and deploy your container images and artifacts anywhere.

  Since it was included in the free-tier, I used it in my stack.

• AWS Fargate: AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate makes it easy for you to focus on building your applications. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.

  Since I did not want to build manage and maintain servers and resources for this simple webapp and due to my interest in serverless computing, I used it.

• AWS Command Line Interface: The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services. With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts.

• AWS Cloud Development Kit: The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. I used the python wrapper of AWS CDK for defining, deploying and destroying my infrastructure.

Deploying the Infrastructure

cd ecs-devops-sandbox-cdk
cdk init --language python 
# Activate your Python virtual environment
source .env/bin/activate
# Install CDK Python general dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Install CDK Python ECS dependencies
pip install aws_cdk.aws_ec2 aws_cdk.aws_ecs aws_cdk.aws_ecr aws_cdk.aws_iam aws_cdk.aws-ecs-patterns
cdk deploy

Destroying the Infrastructure

cd ecs-devops-sandbox-cdk
cdk destroy

Screenshots

Deploying the infrastructure with aws-cdk

Triggering Amazon CodeBuild with a commit

Building and pushing the current webapp to ECR

Applying the task definition

The old version and new version deployed with GitOps

The deployed service can be accessed from the DNS name of the loadbalancer.

References

• AWS Cloud Development Kit
• AWS CLI Installation
• AWS CDK Installation