Amazon EC2 Container Service at AWS re:Invent 2016 – Wrap-up

We wanted to summarize a few of the highlights from this year’s AWS re:Invent.

Announcements

On Thursday December 1, Werner Vogels announced two new features for Amazon ECS.

Blox is a new open source project that enables users to build custom schedulers and other tooling on top of Amazon ECS. Our goal with Blox is to provide tools that simplify the creation of custom schedulers, dashboards and other extensions, so that customers can meet the needs of their specific use cases. Werner also announced that new task placement strategies are coming later this year. Watch the keynote or see the AWS Compute blog for more details on these announcements.

Werner also announced four other services that can be used with Amazon ECS. EC2 Systems Manager parameter store provides a centralized, encrypted store for sensitive information​ that can be used to configure microservices; see the docs for more info. CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages and Docker images that are ready to deploy; see the docs for more info. AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture; see the docs for more info on how to use X-Ray with ECS. AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS; see the AWS Batch page for more details.

Sessions

There were multiple sessions that included deep information about Amazon ECS:

CON301 – Operations Management with Amazon ECS [video]
CON302 – Development Workflow with Docker and Amazon ECS [video]
CON303 – Introduction to Container Management on AWS [video]
CON307 – Advanced Task Scheduling with Amazon ECS and Blox [video]
CON308 – Service Integration Delivery and Automation Using Amazon ECS [video]
CON309 – Running Microservices on Amazon ECS [video]
CON310 – Running Batch Jobs on Amazon ECS [video]
CON311 – Operations Automation and Infrastructure Management with Amazon ECS [video]
CON312 – Deploying Scalable SAP Hybris Clusters using Docker [video]
CON313 – Netflix: Container Scheduling, Execution, and Integration with AWS [video]
CON316 – State of the Union: Containers [video]
CON401 – Amazon ECR Deep Dive on Image Optimization [video]
CON402 – Securing Container-Based Applications [video]
CMP323 – Introducing AWS Batch [video]
DEV313 – Infrastructure Continuous Deployment Using AWS CloudFormation [video]
GAM401 – Riot Games: Standardizing Application Deployments Using Amazon ECS and Terraform [video]
NET203 – From EC2 to ECS: How Capital One uses Application Load Balancer Features to Serve Traffic at Scale [video]

We enjoyed meeting everyone at re:Invent and appreciate all the feedback you had about Amazon ECS, and look forward to hearing about how you use the new features we announced.

— The Amazon ECS Team