It is now time to create an infrastructure in AWS to run container-based solutions!
We will use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) service Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run an application packaged as a container. We will also put a load balancer in front of it, so that we can run multiple copies of that containerised application and distribute the load among those copies.
This is part 4 in a series of articles about building cloud infrastructure solutions with AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). If you have not already read them, I recommend checking out part 1, 2, and 3 as well, which are all on the Tidy Cloud AWS website.
Refine the EC2 deployment
In the previous article, we performed a basic set pf an EC2 virtual machine, using AWS CDK. Our goals were these:
- An EC2 instance
- The instance should run Linux, we will pick Amazon Linux for simplicity
- The instance should not be reachable from the internet
- We should be able to login and access the machine from a command-line prompt in the AWS Console.
- We should use an existing VPC and its subnets.
- We do not care about which availability zone the machine ends up in.
If you have not read the previous article, I recommend you to start with that article first. When you are done there, jump back in here!
The goals in bold were the ones we managed to do in the previous article, so now we have one items on the list left to do - be able to login to the machine via the AWS Console, and still keep the machine private and not reachable from the internet.
If you have not read part 1 in this series of articles, you may want to have a look at that first. , Otherwise, let us get started with defining some AWS infrastructure!
The first infrastructure - virtual machine
First of all we should create an AWS CDK project. You should already have the CDK command-line tool installed. If not, go to the section about AWS CDK installation (in part 1) first to install the tool, then get back here. We will wait!
Our goals
First, let us clarify what we want to accomplish here:
- An EC2 instance
- The instance should run Linux, we will pick Amazon Linux for simplicity
- The instance should not be reachable from the internet
- We should be able to login and access the machine from a command-line prompt in the AWS Console.
- We should use an existing VPC and its subnets.
- We do not care about which availability zone the machine ends up in.
However, we will take smaller steps to reach this goal. Our first goal is simply to get an EC2 instance of any type up and running, in any VPC, subnet, availability zone - just get it up.
Do you want your Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure to be resilient and consistent?
Do you want quickly repeatable and automated AWS infrastructure set-up?
Tired of messy and time-consuming infrastructure management through AWS Console?
Do you use AWS CloudFormation, and find it verbose, clunky to manage?
If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, and want to find a better approach, then this article series may be for you!
Are you excited about using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define infrastructure-as-code?
Do you think that the AWS CDK project initialization is a bit clunky and does not give you what you need to hit the ground running with a new AWS CDK project?
Do you use Typescript? (by choice or by request)
If most of these have the answer yes, you do want to continue reading this article!
(Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash)
It feels daunting, does it not?
Infrastructure-as-code promises to provide consistent, reliable, repeatable, and automated infrastructure provisioning and management.
If you look at some of these tools out there, it can be quite a lot to take in. Can we get started with a reasonable effort?
In this list, there is a mix of tools. It includes both versatile and more simplistic tools, tools with lower-level details, as well as higher-level abstractions. Find out more about these tools, and if they may be a good fit for you!
