Blog > Introduction to Orchestration with AWS ECS
Orchestration
In the past, data ingestion was done as part of a scheduled batch job overnight, but the cloud has changed because we can no longer assume that our systems will be living adjacent to each other in the data centre. Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Moreover, Orchestration helps IT to easily manage complex tasks and workflows.
It also helps you to streamline and optimize frequently occurring processes and workflows, which can support a DevOps approach and help your team deploy applications more quickly.
The user can use orchestration to automate IT processes such as server provisioning, incident management, cloud orchestration, database management, application orchestration, and many other tasks and workflows. Here we are discussing orchestration with AWS ECS.
AWS Serverless
At AWS, we have four criteria such as:
- No infrastructure provisioning, no management: There should be no infrastructure that the user needs permission or to manage; no virtual infrastructure in the sense of virtual machines, physical machines, or even any container orchestration.
- Automatic-Scaling: This is the pretty core concept with cloud computing; as traffic or requests and events come in, the infrastructure should scale up, and then as they go, they should scale down.
- Pay for Value: Pay what you use.
- Highly Available and Secure: Every organization considers security their top priority, and AWS also helps their customers build highly available and resilient applications.
Container Orchestration Capabilities
Scalability
Performance, Responsiveness, Efficiency.
Availability
Fault tolerance, robustness, reliability, resilience, and disaster recovery.
Flexibility
Container orchestration provides format support, interoperability, extensibility, and container runtimes.
Usability
Familiarity, maintainability, compatibility, and debug ability.
Portability
Host operating system, cloud, bare-metal, and hybrid.
Security
Encryption quality, vulnerability process, fast patching, and backporting.
Why Need Container Orchestration?
If an organization runs a microservice application, they need containers for each because they scale pretty quickly. The application could be a messaging system or authentication services etc. They need a bunch of containers to deploy their application in some environment. Here AWS virtual service helps as an enterprise application needs ten containers for each of their ten micro-services. Here the question is, how do they manage these containers.
- How resources are still available?
- Are containers crashed?
- Schedule the next container?
- Remove multiple replicas?
For the solution, the user needs some automation tool.
Features of Container Orchestration Tools
Container Orchestration tools help to manage, scale, and deployment of containers.
- Kubernetes.
- Docker Swarm
- Apache Mesos
- Nomad
- AWS ECS
Elastic Container Service (ECS)
ECS being an orchestrator for containers, will manage the whole life cycle of a container. When a container starts, it needs to reschedule the container, restart, load balancing, etc.
How does ECS work?
Moreover, on AWS, if a user wants to create a container cluster managed by AWS ECS service, they need to create an ECS cluster. The ECS cluster contains services to manage containers. So, the ECS cluster represents a control plane for all the virtual machines that are running containers. And the control plane in the services can be managing the whole life cycle of a container from being started scheduled to being removed as the containers need to run somewhere, so the containers need to run on virtual machines. These virtual machines will be the EC2 instances; these instances will host the containers.
Which Services are running on EC2 Instance?
- Docker Runtime Container
- ECS Agent for control plane communication
ECS with EC2 Instances
- The ECS Hosted on EC2 Instances
- Manages the containers
- No need to manage the virtual machine
- Create EC2 Instances
- Join to ECS cluster
- Check whether enough resources
- Manage Operating System
- Docker Runtime, ECS Agent
Author: SVCIT Editorial Copyright
Silicon Valley Cloud IT, LLC.