In this case, it will be the ECS service defined later. Users then leverage the Terraform CLI to preview and apply expected infrastructure. To build this environment on AWS I used the services listed below: The Terraform configuration I used was quite simple. Finally, add the ECS service and cluster blocks as shown below: The ECS service specifies how many tasks of the application should be run with thetask_definitionanddesired_countproperties within the cluster. It lets you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. It needs some improvements as well that I'll do further. You also need to set the resource_id, the minimum and the maximum number of tasks to scale in and scale out. It can only be configured when first creating a service. You can provision your NAT gateway in public subnets to provide outbound internet access to Fargate tasks that dont require a public IP address. Mount your EFS file system with the WordPress container path. When using a public subnet, you may optionally assign a public IP address to the tasks ENI.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-narrow-sky-1','ezslot_17',130,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-narrow-sky-1-0')}; This security group is needed for the ECS task that will later house our container, allowing ingress access only to the port exposed by the task. If you want to configure autoscaling for ECS service, you must create an autoscaling target firstly. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-netboard-1','ezslot_19',148,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-netboard-1-0')};Then, run the following command to check recent autoscaling activities in your terminal. The AWS Terraform provider will require credentials to access your account programmatically, so generate them according tothese docsif you havent already. Service utilization is measured as the percentage of CPU and memory used by the Amazon ECS tasks that belong to a service on a cluster compared to the CPU and memory specified in the services task definition. You will need to do some initial setup like admin name, password, etc., for the first time, create your first WordPress blog and publish the blog.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[300,250],'hands_on_cloud-narrow-sky-2','ezslot_18',145,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-narrow-sky-2-0')};WordPress Installation. Then, we need to create the variables required for this VPC module inside the variables.tf file. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-sky-1','ezslot_23',147,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-sky-1-0')};After running terraform apply, go to the ECS console, where you can see the ECS service auto-scaling policy with the average CPU utilization metric.ECS Autoscale ( AWS Console ). Unflagging thnery will restore default visibility to their posts. Proficient with Java and C#, understands C++ very well, writing Python for fun and in love with Kotlin. To configure it on AWS I just needed to create an Autoscaling Target and two simple Autoscaling Policies. It works like the Docker Hub, if you're familiar with Docker. This ECS cluster is where newly created EC2 instances will register. The launch type is Fargate so that no EC2 instance management is required. If your user doesnt have any policies attached yet, feel free to add the policy below. Then, your Fargate tasks use Amazon EFS to automatically mount the file system to the tasks specified in your task definition. In this post I'll describe the resources I used to build a infrastructure on AWS and deploy a NodeJS application on it. Define the ECS cluster with the block below: The task definition defines how the hello world application should be run. An instance profile isa container for an IAM role that you can use to pass role information to an EC2 instance when the instance starts. code of conduct because it is harassing, offensive or spammy. All of the resources that will be defined will live within the same VPC. and only accessible to Tacio Nery. Providers are easily downloaded and installed with a few lines of HCL and a single command. You can use an existing AWS EFS module to create an EFS file system. In my case, I will create a new VPC called Terraform-ECS-Demo-vpc.You can use the official Terraform terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws module to create the VPC resources such as route tables, NAT gateway, and internet gateway. "cpu": 256, Then, we need to create an ECS cluster. Note that Running tasks count should be set to 3 Fargate, 0 EC2. I have already created an RDS database instance.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-leader-4','ezslot_14',129,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-leader-4-0')};RDS Instance ( AWS Console ). Once unsuspended, thnery will be able to comment and publish posts again. "entryPoint": [], This is so that specified users or Amazon EC2 instances can access your container repositories and images. Built on Forem the open source software that powers DEV and other inclusive communities. "awslogs-stream-prefix": "${var.app_name}-${var.app_environment}" That is a sample Nginx container image. Amazon ECS is a service provided by AWS that manages the orchestration and provisioning of the containers. Try planning the change first with the command below: The most important part of the output is towards the bottom and should look like this: Applying this plan will increase the number of application containers to three, therefore increasing capacity. Now, what happens when more traffic to the application is expected? Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool created by Hashicorp to make handling infrastructure more straightforward and manageable. "image": "${aws_ecr_repository.aws-ecr.repository_url}:latest", Apply the plan with the commandterraform apply "tfplan". For that to happen, we need to set up two environment variables: if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[336,280],'hands_on_cloud-medrectangle-4','ezslot_2',121,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-medrectangle-4-0')}; Once these files are created, execute the following command to initialize the working directory on your root terminal. That is all tied together with the route table association, where the private route table that includes the NAT gateway is added to the private subnets defined earlier. Made with love and Ruby on Rails. The values for each variable are defined in a file called terraform.tfvars. After creating an EFS file system and mounting targets, you must create a new revision for the WordPress task definition. Thefamilyparameter is required, representing the unique name of our task definition.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[300,250],'hands_on_cloud-large-mobile-banner-2','ezslot_11',127,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-large-mobile-banner-2-0')}; After we create a task definition with terraform apply command, we could create an ECS service. "hostPort": 8080 Terraform will keep the state in an s3 bucket. To mount an Amazon EFS file system on a Fargate task or container, you must create a task definition and then make that task definition available to the containers in your task. You can optionally install theAWS CLIif youd like to gain more insight into the Terraform deployment without heading to the AWS Dashboard. Then, we have to create an instance profile that attaches to the EC2 instances launched from the autoscaling group. Copy the URL and paste it into a browser. You now have a public-facing application created by Terraform running on AWS ECS. You can build the Docker Image locally and push it to the ECR or use a CI/CD platform to do it. Inside the project directory, well need to create theproviders.tffile. All the DevOps knowledge I have is from watching her tutorials! A service is used to guarantee that you always have some number of Tasks running at all times. Thanks for keeping DEV Community safe. AWS ECS with Fargate is a serverless computing platform that makes running containerized services on AWS easier than ever before. With the entire Terraform configuration complete, run the commandterraform plan -out="tfplan"to see what will be created when the configuration is applied. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is an AWS-managed container image registry service that is secure, scalable, and reliable. The first step is to create an AWS S3 bucket to store the Terraform State. Now let's add a security group for the Load Balancer. Next, we will create an ALB that will manage the distribution of requests to all the running tasks. It exists within the service discovery namespace and consists of the namespaces service name and DNS configuration. This file will contain the definition for a single variable that will be passed in on the command line later when resources will be scaled. Add the following variables.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-large-mobile-banner-1','ezslot_10',126,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-large-mobile-banner-1-0')}; After running terraform apply, go to the EC2 console, where you will be able to see two spot instances.EC2 Spot Instances. You should see the text Hello World! printed at the top left of the page. With Amazon ECS, your containers are defined in a task definition that you use to run an individual task or task within a service. Since you declared the minimum capacity to 3 in your wp_service_scale_out schedule action, it will ensure three tasks are running in your ECS service at 9:05 AM London Time.Scaling Activities. With Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. The full code can be found on my [Github].(https://github.com/thnery/terraform-aws-template). Now that the required provider is defined, it can be installed by running the commandterraform init. Before we create the ECS Cluster, we need to create an IAM policy to enable the service to pull the image from ECR. Its not required, but itll make us easier if someone else needs to maintain this infrastructure. Once Terraform is done applying the plan, the bottom of the output should look like the text below: Notice that the load balancer IP has been printed last because the output was defined as part of the configuration. We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers. You will see similar output like this. The network mode is set to awsvpc, which tells AWS that an elastic network interface and a private IP address should be assigned to the task when it runs. Thank you very much for this article. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? "logDriver": "awslogs", What happens when the next best thing comes along, though? Amazon ECS is a service provided by AWS that manages the orchestration and provisioning of the containers. Two will be public and the other two will be private, where each availability zone will have one of each. "name": "${var.app_name}-${var.app_environment}-container", if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-mobile-leaderboard-2','ezslot_16',146,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-mobile-leaderboard-2-0')};The desired count of tasks gets scaled up to the maximum value of 5 once the average CPU utilization of your ECS service is 80% as defined. This tutorial will use only theAWS provider. I also defined a Security Group to avoid external connections to the containers. When it comes bellow this value, the application will scale down. Its best practice to use multiple availability zones when deploying tasks to an AWS ECS Fargate cluster because Fargate will ensure high availability by spreading tasks of the same type as evenly as possible between availability zones. "awslogs-group": "${aws_cloudwatch_log_group.log-group.id}", This module will automatically create the mount targets in the subnets as defined. The sample code bellow will create a VPC. Then, go to the AWS Route 53 service, where you will see two DNS records for the ECS service in your private hosted zone.Route 53 ( AWS Console ). Terraform files use a declarative syntax where the user specifies resources and their properties such as pods, deployments, services, and ingresses. Create a folder called terraform-example where the HCL files will live, then change directories to that folder. Inbound traffic is allowed to two ports 22 for SSH and 80 for HTTP exported by the task. WordPress has a lot of data that it needs to store, such as user accounts and posts, etc., to store the data efficiently for storage and retrieval. She's the G.O.A.T when it comes to all aspects of DevOps/DevSecOps etc! It is a logical group of service discovery services that share the same domain name, such asecsdemo.cloud. DynamoDB can be a locking mechanism for remote storage backend S3 to store state files. It can also be integrated with AWS services like AWS cloudwatch, Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 security groups, EBS volumes, and IAM roles. One very important thing here is the attribute path within health_check. It allows you to run and maintain a specified number of instances of a task definition simultaneously in an Amazon ECS cluster. This is the providers.tffile with this configuration. You can use your preferred CLI to push, pull, and manage the Docker images. These will be used for other resource definitions, and to keep a small footprint for this tutorial, only two availability zones will be used. Then, we need to create the variables required to create a launch configuration inside the variables.tf file. First let's create the Container Registry with the code bellow: The ECR is a repository where we're gonna store the Docker Images of the application we want to deploy. service call has been retried 3 time(s): RequestError: send request failed caused by: Post https://api.ecr.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/: dial tcp 99.82.184.189:443: i/o timeout. When youre ready, you should clean up the resources used in this tutorial. Backend Software Engineer with 10 years of experience and passion in solving problems by using algorithms. We could automate the launch of EC2 instances using autoscaling groups when the load of the ECS cluster reaches over a certain metric such as CPU and memory utilization. "networkMode": "awsvpc" Then, we need to create thevariables.tffile which will store the variables required for the provider to function. The next step is to setup a Load Balancer. The internet gateway, for example, is what allows communication between the VPC and the internet at all. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with your Amazon ECS tasks. Let's create a VPC and configure some Networking resources we're gonna use further. Add the subnet resource definitions tomain.tf: Things that should be public-facing, such as a load balancer, will be added to the public subnet. Create a file calledversions.tfwhere providers will be defined and add the following code: Be sure to replaceandwith the keys for your account. Before creating a VPC, lets define local values such as aws_region and vpc_cidr_block.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[300,250],'hands_on_cloud-box-4','ezslot_4',122,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-box-4-0')}; Configure the VPC for your cluster. Before creating an autoscaling group, we need to create a launch configuration that defines what type of EC2 instances will be launched when scaling occurs. This policy should allow access to all AWS resources so that you dont need to worry about those for this tutorial. However, Fargate tasks might require internet access for specific operations, such as pulling an image from a public repository or sourcing secrets. You can update the desired number of tasks later as you require.ECS Tasks ( AWS Console ), Then, we could access our ECS service through the external link.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[300,250],'hands_on_cloud-leader-3','ezslot_13',128,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-leader-3-0')};Nginx Default Page. { Add the three resources for the load balancer next with the following code: The first block defines the load balancer itself and attaches it to the public subnet in each availability zone with the load balancer security group. } To reach the service, the URL of the load balancer is required. In this session, I will run Fargate tasks in private subnets. This file is not committed in my repository. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-netboard-2','ezslot_20',149,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-netboard-2-0')};You can optionally configure the Amazon ECS service to use Amazon ECS Service Discovery. Now we are ready to create an ECS cluster. Add a file calledoutputs.tfin the same directory asmain.tf, then add the following code: This file will be included in the Terraform configuration when commands are run, and the output will instruct Terraform to print the URL of the load balancer when the plan has been applied. The Docker container exposes the API on port 3000, so thats specified as the host and container ports. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. This is where its specified that the platform will be Fargate rather than EC2, so that managing EC2 instances isnt required. For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse. The containers are defined by a Task Definition that are used to run tasks in a service. This file only have the variables definitions. We also need to set the variables required to create the autoscaling group inside the variables.tf file. ], target_tracking_scaling_policy_configuration, # variables.tf | Auth and Application variables, https://github.com/thnery/terraform-aws-template, VPC and Networking (Subnets, Internet Groups). Finally, we need to register our service discovery resource with our ECS service. Here is what you can do to flag thnery: thnery consistently posts content that violates DEV Community's To see what will be destroyed without actually taking any action yet, run the commandterraform plan -destroy -out=tfplan. Start by adding a data block for AWS availability zones like so: This block will grab availability zones that are available to your account. At the time of service creation, the service registers itself to the privately hosted domain in Route 53 by creating a new record set under it. DEV Community A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers. We will see similar outputs like this.Terraform Init. Hey everyone, I'd like to share my experience with Terraform and AWS. We will use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in the instance configuration. Before we launch the EC2 instances and register them into the ECS cluster, we have to create an IAM role and an instance profile to use when they are launched. The NAT gateway allows resources within the VPC to communicate with the internet but will prevent communication to the VPC from outside sources. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-sky-4','ezslot_26',151,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-sky-4-0')};After running terraform apply, this will create your new ECS service with integrated service discovery. Ensure that the command is run in the same folder thatversions.tfis in. It allows all outbound traffic of any protocol as seen in the egress settings. For more reading, have a look at some of our other tutorials! Terraform requires that the user uses its special language called HCL, which stands for Hashicorp Configuration Language. You can use these CloudWatch metrics to scale out your service to deal with high demand at peak times and scale in your service to reduce costs during periods of low utilization. So, autoscaling is essential for the application I'm working on. Dont forget to enable the vpc hostname in your AWS VPC. The output should look something like this: Run the commandterraform apply "tfplan"when youre ready to tear everything down. Your application has now been scaled horizontally to handle more traffic! UPDATE: Now, with all the configuration files properly written, run the command terraform plan to check what changes are going to be done and terraform apply to review and apply the changes. When your CloudWatch alarms trigger an Auto Scaling policy, Application Auto Scaling decides the new desired count based on the configured scaling policy. This step will create a Fargate Launch Type task definition containing a WordPress docker image. An AWS VPC provides logical isolation of resources from one another. This means you permit the autoscaling service to adjust the desired count of tasks in your ECS Service based on Cloudwatch metrics. Updating the existing services to configure service discovery for the first time is not supported. Add the following tovariables.tf: Save and close the file. I'll explain it later in this post. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[728,90],'hands_on_cloud-box-3','ezslot_7',119,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-box-3-0')}; Create a new project directory on your machine. So, the application will scale up if the memory or the cpu usage reaches 80% of usage. You can choose an existing VPC or create a new one. One to scale by CPU usage and another one for Memory usage. I will use the container image from the ECR repository. Find out more about deploying Architect components in ourdocsandtry it out! Other things that dont need to communicate with the internet directly, such as a Hello World service defined inside an ECS cluster, will be added to the private subnet. After running terraform apply, go to the EC2 console, where you will see a launch configuration like this.Launch Configuration. "essential": true, Traffic from the load balancer will be allowed to anywhere on any port with any protocol with the settings in theegressblock. The target group, when added to the load balancer listener tells the load balancer to forward incoming traffic on port 80 to wherever the load balancer is attached. With Fargate, a user simply defines the compute resources such as CPU and memory that a service will need to run, and Fargate will manage where to run the container behind the scenes. Thank you for reading this post. To start with Terraform, we need to install it. "awslogs-region": "${var.aws_region}", } Once the CPU utilization value falls under this limit, the autoscaling reduces the desired count value to the minimum value of 2. Just go along with the steps in this guide to install it. Before creating an application load balancer, we must create a security group for that ALB. I created a Task Definition compatible with AWS FARGATE, I preferred to do so in order to have a better cost of this infrastructure. "environment": ${data.template_file.env_vars.rendered}, When everything is up and running, youll have your own scalable Hello World service running on the cloud! To create an empty cluster, you need to provide only the cluster name, and no further settings are required. It consists of one listener for HTTP, where the HTTP listener forwards to the target group. This folder is where the installed providers are stored to be used for later Terraform processes. An Amazon ECS cluster is a logical group of tasks or services. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[970,90],'hands_on_cloud-leader-1','ezslot_9',125,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-leader-1-0')}; The data source will help us get the most up-to-date AWS EC2 AMI that is ECS optimized. You can define multiple containers up to ten in a task definition. It's not required but, it'll make our life easier if someone else needs to maintain this infrastructure. "portMappings": [ Execute the following command from one of the EC2 instances within the same VPC where you created the ECS service to verify the service discovery is working. We can define variables in a tfvars. Define six networking resources with the following blocks of HCL: These six resources handle networking and communication to and from the internet outside of the VPC. I created it locally and use S3 to manage access and control its versions. I got most things working except I am getting an error for the task to pull the ecr image. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'hands_on_cloud-portrait-1','ezslot_21',144,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-portrait-1-0')}; The Terraform configuration to create an IAM role looks like this: The next step is to create an app autoscaling target with the ECS service. Set the minimum and the maximum number of the tasks to scale in and scale out. The ECS service later uses this target group to propagate the running tasks. It allows the application to run in the cloud without configuring the environment for the application to run. The first step is create a Bucket on AWS S3 to store the Terraform State. Terraform providers will need to be defined and installed to use certain types of resources. "containerPort": 8080, I will create a directory named terraform-ecs-demo. The infrastructure capacity can be provided by AWS Fargate, the serverless infrastructure that AWS manages, Amazon EC2 instances that you manage, or an on-premise server or virtual machine (VM) that you manage remotely. Some providers require you to configure them with endpoint URLs, cloud regions, or other settings before Terraform can use them.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[728,90],'hands_on_cloud-medrectangle-3','ezslot_5',120,'0','0'])};if(typeof __ez_fad_position!='undefined'){__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-hands_on_cloud-medrectangle-3-0')}; The Terraform configuration I used was quite simple. The provider section is using some variables. You can also be asking about the Database. I believe you noticed we used a lot of variables for the Terraform configuration files. If you dont have a database instance, create a database for WordPress to store the data. The tasks will run in the private subnet as specified in thenetwork_configurationblock and will be reachable from the outside world through the load balancer as defined in theload_balancerblock. When changes are desired, a user simply updates and reapplies the same file or set of files; then, Terraform handles resource creation, updates, and deletion as required. The variableapp_countis included in thevariables.tffile of the configuration for that reason. "memory": 512, It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Finally, access the WordPress application by accessing the load balancer URL. Any idea on how to simplify your approach by creating the basics for aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/au? Heres an architectural diagram of the topic.