Amazon has embraced the container popularity with a number of their services. A good starting point for them is AWS Fargate. This service makes it easy to spin up docker images and scale them as needed. However, it does not have a free tier so you may want to review the pricing page before spending weeks using it for your containers.
Fargate Provides Management Services
Creating containerized services is a great way to reduce configuration headaches and focus on solutions. That is part of the appeal of docker. The challenge is managing the containers and underlying infrastructure as you grow your container solutions. Once you get into production, you have to be able to select where to deploy the containers and manage resources so they can scale to meet user needs.
This is where Fargate comes in. It uses the Amazon services like EC2 to provide the resources your container needs. Thus, you can take advantage of the easy to scale and manage properties of AWS services. Considerations like security and sizing are handled by Fargate so you container management boils down to what you want to run and the starting resources.
The Basis For AWS ECS
It is hard, if not impossible to separate Fargate from the elastic container service. ECS essentially runs on to of Fargate to make container management steps in a wizard instead of hours of calculations and planning. Amazon even provides a few default environments to help you get started. Of course, you can build your custom container to fit your needs a well. If you are using containers, then Fargate is here to make your life easier. They have a few steps for you to follow once you select the ECS option from AWS to get your containers running in the cloud.
We have not spent much time on containers yet, so we will come back to this topic in future posts. Keep your eye out here or sign up for our newsletter to keep up with what we have published and what is coming soon.
