Container applications are deployed and managed using Amazon Elastic Container Service. This helps us orchestrate and run our containerized applications at scale, with built-in support for load balancing and auto-scaling.
All Agents are deployed as containerized applications running on ECS. We tend to use Fargate to run the containers, as it is a more cost-effective solution than EC2. Regarding specs, we use the .25 vCPU | .5 GB RAM configuration, as it is more than enough for our purposes, at least for now.
Task Definition Script
To facilitate the creation of ECS task definitions, we use the define_task.sh script. This interactive script helps create task definitions with the following features:
- Supports both Fargate and EC2 launch types
- Allows selection of existing ECR repositories and image tags
- Configures container ports, CPU, and memory specifications
- Sets up CloudWatch logging automatically
- Creates task definitions with proper IAM roles
The script can be found in our agent configuration repository and is used to standardize the creation of task definitions across different environments.
define_task.sh: Interactive script for creating ECS task definitions
Note: The script is designed to be used in a CI/CD pipeline, but can also be used manually. No CI/CD pipeline exists yet, so it is recommended to use the script manually. Also, the script just creates the task definition, it does not deploy the service.