BuildIt SAM Dice App on Amazon ECS using AWS Fargate

Dependencies ​

This pattern uses the AWS SAM CLI for deploying CloudFormation stacks on your AWS account. You should follow the appropriate steps for installing SAM CLI.

About ​

AWS SAM CLI streamlines the deployment of your containerized applications and necessary infrastructure resources efficiently. An extension of AWS CloudFormation, SAM CLI simplifies serverless application deployment and management by allowing you to define infrastructure as code. This facilitates version control and reproducibility, simplifying the packaging and deployment of your application code, dependencies, and configurations.

This pattern will show how to deploy a simple frontend application to AWS Fargate using AWS SAM CLI. The following resources will be created as part of the provided templates:

• AWS Fargate Cluster
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry
• Fargate Service
• Fargate Task Definition
• Amazon VPC
• Internet Gateway
• 2 Public Subnets
• 2 Private Subnets
• Application Load Balancer
• Amazon DynamoDB Database

Architecture ​

The following diagram shows the architecture that will be deployed:

Define your Infrastructure ​

The code for this pattern is located on GitHub here.

The application is written in Rust. A Dockerfile has been provided for you and can be found in the ./fargate folder of the repo.

The IaC folder contains the SAM CLI template files and will deploy all infrastructure needed for a successful deployment.

To begin, you will want to provision your base infrastructure. This will stand up your Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) so you can build and push your container image.

cd ./iac/base

sam build && sam deploy

Next, you will want to build and push your container image. Be sure to build this in x86_64 architecture. To learn more about multi-platform images, check out Docker's documentation here. This is especially important if you're using macOS with an Apple Silicon chip.

You can find the instructions to build and push your container image in the AWS Console for Elastic Container Registry. Once your repository has been created, you can drill down into that repo i.e. sam-dice-ecrrepo-xxxxxx and then locate the "View Push Commands" button on the top right hand side.

Once you have your image built locally and pushed to your new registry, you are ready to deploy the rest of your infrastructure.

cd ./iac 
sam build && sam deploy

Test it Out ​

Once the second deployment completes, you should have the application running in your Amazon ECS cluster. You can run the following command to get the URL of your application.

FQDN=$(aws cloudformation --region us-east-1 describe-stacks --stack-name sam-dice --query "Stacks[0].Outputs[?OutputKey=='FQDN'].OutputValue" --output text) && echo $FQDN

Once you have the URL of your application, you can "roll the dice" by using curl. Note: There is no slash after ${FQDN}. This is intentional - the slash is included in the environment variable.

curl ${FQDN}roll/2

Clean up ​

To clean up the resources created, you will want to clean up the two CloudFormation stacks you deployed as part of this pattern.

cd ./iac
sam delete

Once the above stack deletes, you will want to delete the first stack you deployed that contains your Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

cd ./iac/base
sam delete