If you are planning on running a workload on AWS ECS, here is a dead-simple step-by-step guide to follow, but first let's understand it. In this first chapter we'll talk about the basics of ECS and Tasks.
What even is ECS?
ECS (Elastic Container Service), as the name suggests, is a service for running containers on AWS. If you don't know about containers, I strongly recommend reading up on that first. A container is essentially an execution environment with its own OS, CPU, and memory, like a tiny VM. ECS allows you to run your containers on AWS without you having to manage any infrastructure at all.
There are primarily two ways to run containers on AWS: via EC2 and via Fargate. We'll focus on Fargate here.
What's the deal with Fargate?
Glad you asked. The traditional way of running applications on the cloud has been to procure a VM, configure it to your needs, install your application, manage your application and web server, and a lot more. Then came serverless in the form of AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and more. The idea is simple: cloud providers ask you to just give them your code, and they will run it for you (as long as you're paying). Fargate applies the same idea to containers.
Tasks and task definitions
A task is how you define a blueprint of your application. You define the containers and the environment they will run in. Each task definition consists of the following:
a. Infrastructure
Your task needs compute (CPU, memory) to run. This is where you define the environment your containers will run in. The most important parameter is the Launch Type, which specifies where your task will run. You have two options: EC2 and Fargate. We'll go with Fargate here.
b. Containers
You defined your compute in the last stage; now you define what you'll run on all that compute.
c. Storage
It's exactly what it says, allocate the number of GBs you want AWS to allocate to your container.
d. Monitoring
If you want to do trace collection or metric collection.
In the next chapter we'll talk about clusters and services, and dive into a step-by-step guide of how to deploy an application to ECS.