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

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

Announcements

On Thursday October 8, Werner Vogels announced three new features for Amazon ECS:

The Amazon EC2 Container Service CLI (Amazon ECS CLI) makes it easier to set up an Amazon ECS cluster and its associated resources (e.g., EC2 instances) and enables a local development experience for Amazon ECS. The Amazon ECS CLI supports Docker Compose, an open-source tool for defining and running multi-container applications. You can use the same Compose definition used to define a multi-container application on your development machine as well as in production.

You can now select additional options for running your Docker containers (e.g., privileged, log drivers). We have also added availability zone awareness to the Amazon ECS service scheduler. You can now use the service scheduler to spread tasks across availability zones maintaining balance and application availability. This new scheduling behavior happens automatically for all new tasks and there is no action required to start using it.

Werner also announced that the Amazon EC2 Container Registry is coming later this year. Watch the keynote or see the AWS blog for more details on these announcements.

Sessions

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

In the Compute track

CMP302 – Amazon EC2 Container Service: Distributed Applications at Scale [video]
CMP406 – Amazon ECS at Coursera: Powering a general-purpose near-line execution microservice, while defending against untrusted code (by Coursera) [video]

In the Devops track

DVO305 – Turbocharge Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containers [video]
DVO308 – Docker & ECS in Production: How We Migrated Our Infrastructure from Heroku to AWS (by Remind) [video]
DVO313 – Building Next-Generation Applications with Amazon ECS (by Meteor) [video]
DVO317 – From Local Docker Development to Production Deployments (by Docker) [video]

Partners

We launched an Amazon ECS partner page to help you find third party solutions that work with Amazon ECS. For example, Shippable published a blog that shows how to set up CI/CD pipelines with Amazon ECS and Weave published a blog that shows how to set up service discovery with Amazon ECS. Other partners include CloudBees, Codeship, Convox, CoreOS, Datadog, Docker, Solano Labs, and Wercker.

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

— The Amazon ECS Team