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David Dennis for AWS Community Builders

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Elastic Container Service

In this post, I will introduce us to the Amazon Web Service offering for running and managing containerised workloads.

Let's begin by understanding what containers are. You can skip if this seems familiar to you.

For newbies are you ready?

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Containers are basically operating system virtualised unit of software that packages codes and all of its dependencies; libraries, binaries so that the application can be moved from one computing environment to another fast and reliably. This solves the problem of environment drift, the popular "it works on my machine syndrome", for developers. Containers run as isolated processes on your operating system, most likely Linux. This provides security to your application as processes don't interfere with one another since they are isolated from one another and the host. You can have one to ten containers running on your linux machine and its somewhat easy to manage these containers and their hosted applications, in terms of resources, liveliness, networking etc.

As a developer, you have deployed applications in containers. These containers are managed by you. Users begin to love your application and you are getting hundreds to thousands of traffic per day, this definitely demands for more containers in order to scale to meet user traffic. Hence your container infrastructure would increase to hundreds and thousands. The big question is, do you have the manpower, skill and time to manage an infrastructure with hundreds to thousands of containers. The answer would be
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This is where Amazon ECS comes to the rescue. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that provides the most secure, reliable and scalable way to run containerised applications. With Amazon ECS, you can launch thousands of containers without worrying about management. You can deploy your web applications and auto-scale as your user continuously grows.

ECS

I would love to keep this post short. Here are resources that would help you get started with Amazon ECS service.

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