Using Amazon ECS for Blue-Green Deployments

Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that helps you store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.  ECR is integrated with Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), streamlining your development and deployment operations. You can use Amazon's other services such as Simple Storage Service (S3) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control and manage your entire container-based solution. In this Lab, you will build two Docker container images with Amazon CodeBuild, push the images to ECR, and perform a blue-green deployment operation using ECS.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab you will be able to:

• Use application source files to create Docker container images and place them in Amazon ECR.
• Create an Amazon ECS cluster.
• Use the Amazon ECR images to create task definitions and services.
• Implement the services in ECS container instances and adjust instance numbers.
• Register ECS container instances with an Application Load Balancer (ALB).
• Switch from one deployed application to another quickly and with no downtime.

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Basic understanding of local operating system and computer use.
• An understanding of Docker and container concepts is helpful, but not required.

Updates

May 30th, 2019 - Added a new validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab in more detail

May 24th, 2019 - Updated CodeBuild instructions and buildspec.yaml to work with the new standard Docker image

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab

July 18th, 2018 - Updated screenshots and instructions to match the new Console experience