Elastigroup & Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) – Integration That Makes Sense

“Getting started with Docker containers is relatively easy, but deploying and managing containers, in the thousands, at scale is difficult without proper cluster management. Maintaining your own cluster management platform involves installing and managing your own configuration management, service discovery, scheduling, and monitoring systems.”

Werner Vogels, CTO – Amazon.com

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Elastigroup is a comprehensive cluster software that optimizes EC2 instances for performance, availability and the lowest cost. Elastigroup connects the dots between compute, storage, network, and other AWS components to provide the best price to performance and meaningful insights.

Amazon ECS uses EC2 instances as the underlying infrastructure hosts as “Container Instances” to deploy containers in the cluster.
There are several ways to manage that:

1. Adding standalone EC2 instances to the ECS cluster.

2. As a part of an Amazon Autoscaling group.

3. Spotinst Elastigroup.

By associating Spotinst Elastigroup with Amazon ECS you automatically get:

OUT OF THE BOX MONITORING & AUTOSCALING

Elastigroup automatically fetches AWS/ECS CloudWatch metrics like CPUReservation and MemoryReservation so you can easily scale up or down EC2 resources whenever it is needed.
Those metrics are presented within the context of the ECS cluster to enable maximum control over your ECS resources.

SAFE INSTANCE DRAINNIG

Elastigroup uses AWS ECS API calls to communicate with the ECS cluster’s scheduler to make sure your desired Task and Services are operating as expected. Whenever an EC2 instance is scheduled for replacement, whether if its due to Scale Down activity or a Spot Replacement Elastigroug invokes the deregisterContainerInstance to notify the ECS scheduler and forces rescheduling of the containers that run on the hosts as well as safely drain the instance from the attached Elastic Load Balancers.

The above features make the operational efforts much easier to manage a set of EC2 resources as a part of an ECS cluster in the most optimal way on AWS.

At Spotinst, we believe that developers and engineers should not focus on optimizing cost or struggle with performance issues, but rather focus on creating deploying and innovating new things.

Get started and launch your ECS cluster with Elastigroup today.