Introduction to ECS

- [Philip] Hello and welcome to my Getting Started with AWS ECS course. My name is Philip Afable and let's get started. Let's first take a look at the course outline. First thing, we'll discuss what is AWS ECS, also known as Elastic Container Services, what problems does it solve, and how you can leverage it in your AWS environment. So this project will have you creating an ECS cluster. Then you'll create a task definition, then build containers using a Task and Service, and finally configure a container repository with ECR. We'll then use the ECR repository within our container definition for ECS to use. What is ECS? ECS is a container orchestration service developed by AWS. Since it's developed by AWS, it has unparalleled intergrations with AWS services. Competitors to ECS are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Hashicorp Nomad. Those of you who are already familiar with container orchestration may find the ECS a much simpler solution for organizations primarily operating in AWS. Let's now take a look at a logical view of how the various ECS components relate to each other. So the ECS cluster is an EC2 instance where all of the containers will run on. There is another option you can choose, which is Fargate, and that's a serverless option provided by AWS where AWS will manage the ECS cluster so you don't have to worry about provisioning on EC2 instance. In ECS, containers are considered tasks. And I'll show you more later on on how to create these tasks and run them on the ECS instance or ECS cluster. And the way these tasks are defined is through a task definition. What this task definition defines is what container image to use, how much resources to assign to this container, and if you're using a volume, you can even use EFS and mount it to these containers.