Key Terms
AWS CLI v2
- AWS CLI v2 is the second major version of the Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface, a tool that lets you interact with AWS services from the terminal instead of using the AWS web console.
AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service):
- an AWS-managed container orchestration service that allows you to run, manage, and scale Docker containers on AWS infrastructure.
AWS EC2:
- AWS EC2 is an AWS service that provides resizable virtual servers in the cloud.
AWS Fargate:
- AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers.
Terraform
- Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool created by HashiCorp.
- It allows you to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files, instead of manually creating resources.
ECS / ECR Core Concepts
ECR Repository
- A private Docker image registry in AWS that stores your container images (similar to Docker Hub).
ECS Cluster
- A logical grouping where ECS runs tasks/services.
- With EC2 launch type, the cluster has registered EC2 “container instances.”
- With Fargate, the cluster is mainly logical (compute is managed by AWS).
Task Definition
- A blueprint that defines how to run your container(s): image URI, CPU/memory, ports, env vars, logging, and IAM roles.
ECS Task
- A running instance of a task definition (the actual workload consuming compute).
- An ECS Task is a running instance created from a Task Definition. It runs one or more containers using images stored in ECR (or another container registry).
- a task is launched from a task definition, so in almost all normal ECS workflows you create the task definition first.
Fargate (in ECS context)
- The compute option where AWS manages the underlying servers; ECS runs your tasks on Fargate without you managing EC2.
ECR stores images; ECS runs containers; EC2/Fargate provide the compute where tasks actually run.