Rapid Docker on AWS: The fastest way to start with Docker on Amazon Web Services

by Andreas Wittig, Michael Wittig

About the book

Rapid Docker on AWS guides you through deploying your web application on a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective container-based infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). You will learn to leverage three important DevOps techniques—Docker, continuous deployment, and infrastructure as code—to automate the process of deploying your Docker containers and infrastructure to AWS when changes are committed to your source code repository.

The book introduces an architecture consisting of a load balancer, a container cluster, and a scalable relational database. All used AWS building blocks are fully managed services requiring minimal operational effort. You will learn to scale the whole stack, including the Docker containers, the database, and the load balancer. The architecture minimizes your costs for idle components.

You will learn how to bundle your web application into a Docker image by using a Dockerfile. Furthermore, you'll get access to templates for the cloud infrastructure already defined in code. On top of that, the book ships together with a template for a delivery pipeline, allowing you to deploy your web application as well as the underlying infrastructure after every commit to your source code repository.

The book and templates allow you to dockerize and deploy your web application (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python Django, Java Spring Boot, and Node.js Express) on a production-ready infrastructure within a day. The templates leverage the CloudFormation modules provided by the open-source project cfn-modules.

In summary, you will get to know the following services in this book: ECS, Fargate, ALB, RDS Aurora Serverless, CloudFormation, CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CloudWatch Logs, and ECR.

Table of Contents

Introducing the highly available, scalable, and cost-effective architecture

Benefits of the architecture
Overview of the architecture
Preparing your machine
Launching the demo infrastructure and application


Dockerizing and spinning up your web application

Getting started with Docker
Building the Docker images for your web application
Testing your web application locally
Pushing your Docker image to the Amazon ECR registry
Launching your web application


Mastering the building blocks of the cloud infrastructure

Managing your stack with infrastructure as code: AWS CloudFormation
Load-balancing requests to your containers: Amazon ALB
Managing and running your containers: ECS and Fargate
Configuring a custom domain name and HTTPS: Route 53 and Certificate Manager
Storing and querying your data: RDS Aurora Serverless
Monitoring and debugging: CloudWatch
Running scheduled jobs (cron) in the background


Deploying your source code and infrastructure continuously

Versioning your source code with Git: AWS CodeCommit
Setting up a deployment pipeline: AWS CodeBuild

186 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 13, 2019

Reviews

[Marcin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book use a lot of CloudFormation.
This help a lot in provisioning cluster but hidde complexity of createing everything manually.
I would prefer have one chapter on manually creating each part of ECS cluster and then start to use CloudFormation.