HAQM EC2 Container Service at AWS re:Invent – Wrap-up

We wanted to summarize a few of the highlights from this year’s AWS re:Invent.

Announcements

On Thursday October 8, Werner Vogels announced three new features for HAQM ECS:

The HAQM EC2 Container Service CLI (HAQM ECS CLI) makes it easier to set up an HAQM ECS cluster and its associated resources (e.g., EC2 instances) and enables a local development experience for HAQM ECS. The HAQM ECS CLI supports Docker Compose, an open-source tool for defining and running multi-container applications. You can use the same Compose definition used to define a multi-container application on your development machine as well as in production.

You can now select additional options for running your Docker containers (e.g., privileged, log drivers). We have also added availability zone awareness to the HAQM ECS service scheduler. You can now use the service scheduler to spread tasks across availability zones maintaining balance and application availability. This new scheduling behavior happens automatically for all new tasks and there is no action required to start using it.

Werner also announced that the HAQM EC2 Container Registry is coming later this year. Watch the keynote or see the AWS blog for more details on these announcements.

Sessions

There were multiple sessions that included deep information about HAQM ECS:

In the Compute track

CMP302 – HAQM EC2 Container Service: Distributed Applications at Scale [video]
CMP406 – HAQM ECS at Coursera: Powering a general-purpose near-line execution microservice, while defending against untrusted code (by Coursera) [video]

In the Devops track

DVO305 – Turbocharge Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containers [video]
DVO308 – Docker & ECS in Production: How We Migrated Our Infrastructure from Heroku to AWS (by Remind) [video]
DVO313 – Building Next-Generation Applications with HAQM ECS (by Meteor) [video]
DVO317 – From Local Docker Development to Production Deployments (by Docker) [video]

Partners

We launched an HAQM ECS partner page to help you find third party solutions that work with HAQM ECS. For example, Shippable published a blog that shows how to set up CI/CD pipelines with HAQM ECS and Weave published a blog that shows how to set up service discovery with HAQM ECS. Other partners include CloudBees, Codeship, Convox, CoreOS, Datadog, Docker, Solano Labs, and Wercker.

We enjoyed meeting everyone at re:Invent and appreciate all the feedback you had about HAQM ECS, and look forward to hearing about how are using the new features we just announced.

— The HAQM ECS Team