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Why use containers for your application?

Containers are a popular open source standard for developing, packaging, and operating applications at scale. There are a few key benefits to using containers: Packaging Containers provide you with a reliable way to gather your application components and package them together into one build artifact.

What are the benefits of packaging your application as a container?

Why use infrastructure as code?

Infrastructure as code is the process of provisioning and managing your cloud resources by writing a template file that describes what infrastructure you want to create.

Infrastructure as code can help you deploy cloud architecture faster and more reliably.

Hi! I'm Jeramiah!

Hi! I’m Jeramiah Dooley, and I manage the team of Developer Advocates that support ECS, App Mesh, Service Connect and the rest of the components and tools that are used to deploy containerized applications.

Meet Jeramiah Dooley, developer advocate manager at AWS

Hello World

Well, well, well. Look what we have here. You have no idea how pleased I am to present to the world the newest resources for AWS Builders using Amazon Elastic Container services.

Welcome to Containers on AWS, the newest resource for AWS builders who want to deploy containerized applications on Amazon ECS

Hi I'm Nathan Peck! 👋

Hi! I work as a senior developer advocate at AWS. Prior to working at AWS I worked in the NYC startup scene, on my own personal projects, as well as Airtime (a social media platform focused on live social experiences), and StoryDesk (an iPad first presentation software with a built-in analytics system).

Meet AWS developer advocate Nathan Peck, and learn his thoughts on building with containers.

Shalom, I'm Maish!!

Hello everyone, it is a pleasure to meet you all. Let me introduce myself. My name is Maish Saidel-Keesing and I am a Senior Developer Advocate for the Amazon Elastic Container Service team at AWS.

Meet Maish Saidel-Keesing, developer advocate at AWS

Hello friends, I'm Jessica!

Hi friends! My name is Jessica Deen and I’m currently a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS focusing on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Prior to joining AWS, I worked for Microsoft in a variety of capacitities for over a decade.

Meet Jessica Deen, developer advocate at AWS

EC2 or AWS Fargate?

There are two main compute options for running containers with Amazon Elastic Container Service: EC2 (Deploy and manage your own cluster of self managed virtual machine instances that can each run one or more containers) AWS Fargate (Run containers directly, without any virtual machines to think about) Both are completely valid techniques for operating your containers in a scalable and reliable fashion.

Comparison of Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate across pricing, performance, and administrative overhead, with examples of best fits for each compute option.

Why should I use an orchestrator like Amazon ECS or Kubernetes?

If you work in software development for the cloud you have probably heard of infrastructure orchestrators such as Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service, or Hashicorp Nomad.

Does container orchestration make it easier to manage your application, or does it make it harder?

Run time sensitive workloads on ECS Fargate with clock accuracy tracking

Introduction In part 1 and part 2 of this series, the importance of measuring time accuracy and relevant concepts were discussed. Additionally, we covered specifics on ways to put those concepts into practice, track metrics using Amazon CloudWatch and implement a practical solution for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. In this part 3, […]

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Scale to 15,000+ tasks in a single Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster

Introduction Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that simplifies your deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. Amazon ECS has deep AWS integrations and best practices built-in, which enable you to run and scale your applications in the cloud or on-premises, without the complexity of managing a control […]

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PBS speeds deployment and reduces costs with AWS Fargate

This blog post was co-authored by Mike Norton – VP Cloud Services & Operations, PBS, Warrick St. Jean – Sr. Director Solution Architect, PBS, and Brian Link – Director, Technical Operations, PBS Introduction PBS is a private, nonprofit corporation, founded in 1969, whose members are America’s public TV stations. They have been an AWS customer […]

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Start Spring Boot applications faster on AWS Fargate using SOCI

About a year ago, we published a post on how to Optimize your Spring Boot application for AWS Fargate, where we went into different optimization techniques to speed up the startup time of Spring Boot applications for AWS Fargate. We started the post with “Fast startup times are key to quickly react to disruptions and […]

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Build secure application networks with VPC Lattice, Amazon ECS, and AWS Lambda

Introduction In this post, we’ll explore how to publish and consume services running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda, as Amazon VPC Lattice services. For an introduction to Amazon VPC Lattice, please read the documentation here. One main reason customer experience a lower velocity of innovation, is the complexity they deal […]

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Improving operational visibility with AWS Fargate task retirement notifications

Introduction AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containerized workloads, removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing and patching the underlying infrastructure. In this blog post we dive into AWS Fargate task retirement, one of the ways AWS keeps the infrastructure secure and up to date. AWS has recently updated the AWS Fargate task retirement […]

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Multi-account infrastructure provisioning with AWS Control Tower and AWS Proton

Introduction The majority of the enterprise customers tend to establish centralize control and well-architected organization-wide policies when it comes to distribution of cloud resources in multiple teams. These teams are primarily divided into three categories - IT operations, Enterprise Security, and Application (App)-development. While delivery of business value from application standpoint falls under the purview of […]

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Announcing additional Linux controls for Amazon ECS tasks on AWS Fargate

Introduction An Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task is a number of co-located containers that are scheduled on to AWS Fargate or an Amazon EC2 container instance. Containers use Linux namespaces to provide workload isolation—and with namespaces—even though containers are scheduled together in an Amazon ECS task, they’re still isolated from each other and […]

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Implement custom service discovery for Amazon ECS Anywhere tasks

Introduction Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a managed container orchestration service offered by AWS. It simplifies the deployment, management, and scalability of containerized applications using Amazon ECS task definitions through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS Software Development Kits (AWS SDKs). Customers who require running containerized workloads, […]

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Preventing log loss with non-blocking mode in the AWSLogs container log driver

Introduction For improved observability and troubleshooting, it is recommended to ship container logs from the compute platform to a container running on to a centralized logging server. In the real world, the logging server may occasionally be unreachable or unable to accept logs. There is an architectural tradeoff when designing for log server failures. Service […]

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How RGC Genetics Center achieved infrastructure automation at scale using AWS Proton

This post was co-written with Rouel Lanche, Associate Director IT Architect, Regeneron Introduction Regeneron is a leading biotechnology company that invents, develops, and commercializes life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases. Founded and led for 35 years by physician-scientists, Regeneron’s unique ability to repeatedly and consistently translate science into medicine has led to numerous FDA-approved […]

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Building better container images

Introduction Many applications built today or modernized from monoliths are done so using microservice architectures. The microservice architecture makes applications easier to scale and faster to develop, which enables innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features. In addition, microservices also provide lifecycle autonomy enabling applications to have independent build and deploy processes, which provides technological […]

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Accelerate Amazon ECS-based workloads with ECS Blueprints

Introduction We are introducing ECS Blueprints for AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) that makes it easier and faster to build container workloads for the Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). ECS Blueprints is a collection of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) open-source modules that help you configure and deploy container workloads on top of Amazon […]

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Implementing application load balancing of Amazon ECS Anywhere workloads using Traefik Proxy

Introduction With Amazon ECS Anywhere, you can run and manage containers on any customer-managed infrastructure using the same cloud-based, fully managed, and highly scalable container orchestration service you use in AWS today. Amazon ECS Anywhere provides support for registering an external instance, such as an on-premises server or virtual machine (VM), to your Amazon ECS […]

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Under the hood: Lazy Loading Container Images with Seekable OCI and AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containerized workloads, now supports lazy loading container images that have been indexed using Seekable OCI (SOCI). Lazy loading container images with SOCI reduces the time taken to launch Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks on AWS Fargate. Donnie Prakoso’s launch post provides details on how to get […]

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Using Windows Authentication with gMSA on Linux Containers on Amazon ECS

On July 17th 2023, AWS launched support for Windows authentication with gMSA on non-domain-joined (domainless) Amazon ECS Linux container instances. This blog post has been updated to cover both modes, making domainless mode the default. Introduction Today, we are announcing the availability of Credentials Fetcher integration with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This […]

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Scaling IaC and CI/CD pipelines with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and AWS Proton

Introduction Modern applications run on a variety of compute platforms in AWS including serverless services such as AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, and AWS Fargate. Organizations today are often required to support architectures using a variety of these AWS services, each offering unique runtime characteristics, such as concurrency and scaling, which can be purpose fit […]

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Announcing AWS Fault Injection Simulator new features for Amazon ECS workloads

Introduction We are happy to announce new features in AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) that allow you to inject a variety faults into workloads running in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This blog shows how to use new AWS FIS actions with Amazon ECS. AWS Fault Injection […]

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Hosting Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) Local-runner on Amazon ECS Fargate for development and testing

Introduction Data scientists and engineers have made Apache Airflow a leading open-source tool to create data pipelines due to its active open-source community, familiar Python development as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) workflows, and an extensive library of pre-built integrations. Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is a managed service for Apache Airflow that makes […]

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Improvements to Amazon ECS task launch behavior when tasks have prolonged shutdown

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now launches tasks faster on container instances that are running tasks that have a prolonged shutdown period. This enables customers to scale their workloads faster and improve infrastructure utilization. About Amazon ECS scheduling Amazon ECS is a container orchestrator that’s designed to be able to launch and track application […]

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Migrate cron jobs to event-driven architectures using Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon EventBridge

Introduction Many customers use traditional cron job schedulers in on-premise systems. They need a simple approach to move these scheduled tasks to AWS without refactoring while unlocking the scalability of the cloud. A lift-and-shift migration to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is always a possibility, but that doesn’t take advantage of cloud-native services or […]

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How to establish private connectivity for ECS Anywhere

Introduction In 2014, AWS announced Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed service that helps you orchestrate, deploy, and scale containerized applications. Although Amazon ECS serves a wide variety of customers from different segments, sizes, and verticals, there are cases where the applications need to run locally. For example, this often occurs in […]

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Implement Amazon ECS Anywhere enhanced workload resilience in disconnected scenarios

Introduction Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere is a feature of Amazon ECS that lets you run and manage container workloads on your infrastructure. This feature helps you meet compliance requirements and scale your business without sacrificing your on-premises investments. When extending Amazon ECS to customer-managed infrastructure, external instances are registered to a managed Amazon […]

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Using Windows Authentication with gMSA on Linux Containers on Amazon ECS

Introduction Today, we are announcing the availability of Credentials Fetcher integration with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This integration makes it easier for developers to implement Windows Authentication in Linux containers running on Amazon ECS using Microsoft Active Directory (AD) group Managed Service Account (gMSA). The Credentials Fetcher daemon allows containers running on Linux […]

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Autoscaling Amazon ECS services based on custom metrics with Application Auto Scaling

Introduction Application Auto Scaling is a web service for developers and system administrators who need a solution for automatically scaling their scalable resources for AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) services, Amazon DynamoDB tables, AWS Lambda Provisioned Concurrency, and more. Application Auto Scaling now offers support for scaling such resources using […]

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Implementing a pub/sub architecture with AWS Copilot

Introduction The AWS Copilot CLI is a tool that since its launch in 2020, developers have been using to build, manage, and operate Linux and Windows containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Fargate, and AWS App Runner. In this post, I’ll walk you through how you can use AWS Copilot CLI to […]

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Migrate existing Amazon ECS services from service discovery to Amazon ECS Service Connect

At re:Invent in November 2022 we announced a new Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) solution for service-to-service communication called Amazon ECS Service Connect. Amazon ECS Service Connect enables easy communication between microservices and across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) by leveraging AWS Cloud Map namespaces and logical service names. This allows you to […]

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Announcing Amazon ECS Task Definition Deletion

Today, we are happy to announce new functionality in Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) that allows you to delete task definition revisions. Until now, you were only able to deregister a task definition revision and it would no longer display in your ListTaskDefinition API calls or in your Amazon ECS console, unless you specifically […]

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Kubernetes as a platform vs. Kubernetes as an API

Introduction What is Kubernetes? I have been working on this technology since the beginning and after 8 years, I’m still having a problem defining what it is. Some people define Kubernetes as a container orchestrator but does that definition capture the essence of Kubernetes? I don’t think so. In this post, I’d like to explore […]

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Architecture evolution: From zero to future-proof architecture at home24

This blog was co-authored by Aurelijus Banelis, Senior Software Engineer at home24 Introduction Home24 is a leading pure-play home & living e-commerce platform in continental Europe and Brazil. It has third-party and private-label assortments combined with a tailored user experience — and that is a good foundation for a sustainable technology business. Aurelijus is proud […]

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Configuring KMS encryption at rest on ECR repositories with ECR replication

Introduction In this blog post, you’ll learn how to configure AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) at rest on Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) with image replication. By default, repository settings aren’t replicated, and with the information contained in this article, we’ll empower your organization to put security first while using the AWS tools […]

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