In a microservices architecture, the communication between services is the single most important factor determining your system's overall speed, performance, scalability, and reliability.
I discovered firsthand that implementing this in a production environment isn't straightforward. To save others from wasting valuable time (which could be better spent playing Valorant), I decided to write this guide.
What is AWS Service Connect? 🧐
AWS Service Connect is a feature within Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that simplifies how microservices communicate with each other. A key detail is that it works exclusively for services deployed on ECS.
For communication between services on ECS, Service Connect provides several key advantages:
Built-in Resilience 💪
Automatic Load Balancing: Distributes traffic evenly across all healthy service tasks.
Automatic Retries: Handles transient issues, like 503 errors, without manual intervention.
Connection Draining: Ensures graceful shutdowns by completing in-flight requests before a task is terminated.
Network Health Checks: Instantly removes unhealthy tasks from service rotation based on network-level health.
Enhanced Observability 📊
It automatically gathers and sends detailed application-level network metrics—such as request counts, error rates, and latency—to Amazon CloudWatch. This gives you deep insights into how your services are interacting.
Simplified Networking 🌐
Service Connect eliminates the need for complex configurations like custom DNS or manually setting up internal load balancers for communication within your ECS cluster.
Service Connect vs. Service Discovery
It's important to distinguish Service Connect from basic Service Discovery. While Service Discovery acts as a simple registry for services to find each other's network location (IP and port), AWS Service Connect is a complete, managed service mesh for ECS. It handles not only discovery but also provides automated connectivity, traffic management, load balancing, resilience, and observability.
How Service Connect works?
I have written a detailed blog here to help you setup within your ECS Cluster as well.
Top comments (0)