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CurtFarley
CurtFarley

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More new tech skills - Docker up to the plate. Pt 3 - with AWS ECS

Welcome, thanks for coming back!

Well, this was an interesting exercise. I'll be honest, I only mostly understood what I was doing in this AWS Workshop. I really try to understand what's happening & how/why & not just push buttons when I do hands-on lessons, but sometimes I just don't get it 100%

The other thing that made it interesting were the mistakes in it. I found 2, there is a problem with the NAT Gateway/Internet GW setup. The CloudFormation stack sets them both up, but I had to redo the route tables to use the IGW instead of the NAT GW to get the website to work. It's also completely possible I missed some bit of config I needed to do to make the NATGW work.
The other is a problem with the whole thing not building the appropriate EC2 instances for the 'Cats' half of the website. I could have missed something though. I went back over the instructions twice more to see if I did, to no effect. I didn't have time to dig into that one to figure out what the exact problem was though.

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I should go back and redo this workshop, not only to figure out the problem, but to make sure I fully understand everything that is going on. I had to tear it all down due to time constraints so I wouldn't get charged for all the running objects in my free tier account. It would be nice if they had AWS Sandboxes to run these in - if you're at an AWS event, they do - but outside of that you use your own account.

This is the first AWS workshop I've done (outside of an event), & overall it's a good experience. Although they have this listed as a 300 level workshop, it's not so complicated that having only basic knowledge or experience with Docker is a hinderance. I think they mark it as 300 due to the extended logging & setup with Firelens. That was completely new to me (not surprising, who can keep up...) but per AWS "You can use FireLens for Amazon ECS to use task definition parameters to route logs to an AWS service or AWS Partner Network (APN) destination for log storage and analytics." So it's a seemingly dedicated log utility for ECS.

The one thing that is, irritating, is that for ECS, the intro level workshop (Amazon ECS Basic Workshop) is in Japanese only. Since I only know how to count to 10 in Japanese & a few other words, & I can't read Kanji at all, probably not gonna get too far with that one. Hopefully, AWS adds an English version of it.

Thanks for reading. I think there will be 1 more blog in this series, but I have to sit down & do some work first. Gonna give Docker-Compose a spin. So stay tuned to see how that works out.

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