Getting Started with Amazon ECS and Amazon Fargate

Docker can be installed on the most commonly used OS platforms. CoreOS has Docker pre-installed, and is designed specifically for running Docker containers. Docker for AWS provides an out-of-the-box Docker swarm mode in which a cluster of nodes, called a swarm, provides a distributed platform for running Docker container applications.

Problem: All the aforementioned Docker platforms are only different types of Docker installations, and require Docker containers to run and be managed on the command line.

Solution: Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a managed service for Docker containers with built-in support for scaling, load balancing, networking, storage, logging, and other Docker container management tasks. Amazon ECS supports two launch types: EC2 and Fargate.

With the EC2 launch type, EC2 instances are started to run Docker containers. The Fargate launch type, which was introduced recently (November 2017), hosts tasks that encapsulate Docker containers. The tasks are directly made accessible to the user via an Elastic Network Interface (ENI). The EC2 instances on which Fargate is provisioned are not exposed to the user and are not directly accessible. 

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

• What Amazon Fargate is
• Benefits of Fargate
• Amazon ECS objects
• Compute resources in Amazon ECS Fargate
• What's new in the Amazon Fargate launch type mode?