ECS Demo Service

This project is a demonstration of running a .NET Core service inside of Amazon ECS. The service is packaged into a Docker image and pushed to the Amazon Elastic Container Registry for deployment. The project contains scripts to build and deploy this service using CloudFormation.

Prerequisites

In order to work on this service, you will need to install .NET Core 2.1 or newer on your development machine (only if you want to use an IDE to make changes). You will also need to have Docker installed and running to be able to package the service for deployment.

Building

To build the service, use Docker:

docker build -t ecs-demo-service .

Running

To run your built Docker container, use the following command:

docker run -t ecs-demo-service -p 8080:80

Then you can connect to the service on http://localhost:8080.

Deployment

If you want to deploy the service to Amazon ECS, you will first need to install the AWS CLI on your local development computer. You will also need to set up your AWS account in your ~/.aws/credentials credential store. Make note of the name of the profile you configure.

Note: if you name the profile ecs-demo, you will not need to configure any parameters in the deployment script.

Permissions

Deployment is handled through CloudFormation. In order to deploy, make sure your user profile has the following AWS managed policies attached to it:

• AmazonEC2FullAccess
• AWSLambdaFullAccess
• IAMFullAccess
• AutoScalingFullAccess
• AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess
• AmazonS3FullAccess
• CloudWatchLogsFullAccess
• AmazonECS_FullAccess
• AmazonSNSFullAccess

Additionally, you will need to attach this inline policy to give access to CloudFormation:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Action": [
        "cloudformation:*"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Running Deployment

You will need to make a few changes in the ./build/deploy.sh script if you used a different AWS profile name other than ecs-demo, or if you wish to change the name of the CloudFormation stack. Lines 4 through 7 of the deployment script contain these variables. They are described below.

• STACK_NAME - the name of the CloudFormation stack to create
• CLOUD_FORMATION_BUCKET_NAME - The name of the bucket to upload the stack files to (will be created for you)
• REPOSITORY_NAME - The name of the ECR repository to use
• AWS_PROFILE - The name of the AWS profile to use to deploy

Once these are configured, you can deploy the stack by this commands in the project root:

./build/deploy.sh

This may take a while on the first deployment (10+ minutes). The script will print out the service URLs that you can use to access your service once it is deployed.