Understanding the Applications of Amazon ECS

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon ECS is short for Amazon Elastic Container Services. It is a cloud computing service offered by AWS.

The solution manages containers and helps developers run applications in the cloud. It allows the code for the application to run without the need to configure a physical environment.

Developers use AWS accounts to arrange and administer scalable applications. The scalable applications then run on a group of servers called clusters and through API commands.

Amazon ECS is a fast container management service that easily runs, stops, and manages containers on a cluster. The containers work on defined tasks that are delegated between individual tasks and tasks within services. 

Amazon ECS is available on AWS Management Console and software development kits (SDKs). ECS was developed keeping in mind the growth and popularity of containerization.

ECS works well with Docker, the open-source Linux container service. ECS helps developers to effortlessly use Docker containers. Activities like hosting a simple website to running complex and distributed microservices are easily executed.

AWS enables organizations to update, scale-up, or down the containers according to their requirements. Services like AWS Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Elastic Block Store volumes, and AWS Identity and Access Management roles are assisted for customizations.

Features of Amazon ECS

Amazon ECS is built to execute high-performance, support applications, etc. Hence let us explore key features offered by Amazon ECS:

• AWS Fargate Support 

AWS Fargate is accessible with Amazon ECS. Fargate controls the accessibility of containers in the infrastructure.

AWS Fargate enables teams to concentrate on more important tasks. It handles mundane tasks like EC2 instance types, provisioning, cluster configuration, etc.

• Docker Support

Amazon ECS supports Docker and enables users to manage Docker containers. It allows users to package applications as a container locally and deploy them without any configuration changes.

• Programmatic Control

Amazon ECS offers teams a set of API actions. It allows teams to integrate, manage and extend the services.

The API actions are simple which allows teams to create, delete, manage, register and deploy clusters. 

• Container Deployments and Auto-Recovery

Amazon ECS allows updates on the containers for new versions. Once the containers are deployed, Amazon ECS will recover maligned containers automatically and assure a good number of containers are supporting the applications.

• Scheduling

Amazon ECS helps teams with multiple scheduling strategies. The strategies ensure the containers are placed across clusters based on the resource and availability requirements.

Amazon ECS can schedule tasks, services, and Daemon based on the requirements.

Benefits of Amazon ECS

• Amazon ECS is beneficial for development teams as it is simple and easy to set up for applications. 
• AWS completely manages Amazon ECS to deal with platform-related issues and users can concentrate on migrating applications.
• Amazon ECR and Amazon ECS provide efficient security for applications.
• Amazon ECS is cost-efficient as it provides smaller and cross-functional teams to schedule various containers on the same node. It also achieves high density on Amazon EC2.
• Amazon ECS provides advanced compatibility as it eliminates any issues that arise due to deployments functioning in multiple environments. 
• Amazon ECS is flexible and is designed for collaborations with other AWS solutions. Amazon ECS offers users an overall solution for running a variety of containerized applications and services.
• Amazon ECS is easily extensible and provides visibility to control the AWS resources to be easily integrated.

The Applications of Amazon ECS

Applications of Amazon ECS have helped many companies achieve and exceed their objectives. Here are a few use cases of Amazon ECS:

GoPro

GoPro provides versatile cameras to capture and share people’s experiences. GoPro hardware develops cameras for photos or videos for all environments, even underwater.

Earlier, the company ran individual GoPro microservice on virtual machines using a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The approach worked well, although it failed to efficiently use the server capacity.

Here, GoPro looked for adapting a container-based approach. Container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes open-source platform were considered.

The company then adapted Amazon ECS which easily integrated with other AWS, which GoPro was already using. Amazon ECS provided detailed security permissions, monitoring, and metrics as per GoPro’s requirements.

Amazon ECS helped GoPro to enhance the capabilities of using its resources and applications. Application of Amazon ECS reduced Amazon EC2 footprint by 70%.

It encourages developers to manage service queues for mitigation. Amazon ECS helped adopt infrastructure as code for deployment and management consistency of applications.

According to Zaven Boni, DevOps Engineering Lead, GoPro, “By taking advantage of Amazon ECS, we have the power to understand, manipulate, and manage our environment easily.”

Ubisoft

Ubisoft is a globally leading gaming company. It creates, publishes, and distributes interactive and intriguing games like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Tom Clancy’s video game series, etc.

Ubisoft turned its development, staging, and production environments to AWS for Storm. The company uses Auto Scaling for automated provisioning of compute resources and depends on Amazon ECS for orchestration features. 

The storm is a video game developer and studio of Ubisoft. The Storm applications help route traffic between consoles using Amazon ECS.

Ubisoft can easily manage Storm relay service using Amazon ECS. 

According to Eric Fortin, Technical Architect, Ubisoft, “Using AWS, we can automatically scale to support large traffic spikes. Over the last Christmas holiday, we met traffic demands for Watch Dogs 2 by scaling up to 120 relay servers, routing 70 terabytes of data in 20 days.” He also mentions, “Managing Storm is very simple now because we use Amazon ECS for orchestration and deployment.” He adds, “Instead of installing and overseeing a management and orchestration tool ourselves—which would have taken us weeks—we configured our service to support the traffic spike in a few days using Amazon ECS.”

The Washington Post’s Arc Publishing

Arc Publishing is a SaaS publishing platform The Washington Post developed for the newsroom. It allows media companies to leverage the scalability and flexibility of the publishing platform.

Arc is developed on containerized applications running on AWS. Docker containers and Amazon ECS were pivotal in helping Washington Post develop applications.

Arc expanded its multi-tenant architecture, rapid scaling, and optimized the speed of development. Now, Arc Publishing supports more than 100 microservices that are composed of over 3000 containers and runs on more than 150 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

Arc also uses a custom development platform, built on AWS and completes more than 50 deployments per hour.