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Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

blox.github.io

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Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#21

Post by Rapzid »

aledbf wrote: post #19
Rapzid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the last time the issue was looked at, but I could consolidate some of the benefits that have brought up here: * Websockets support * Http/2 support * Layer 7 routing + Route to specific ports(stop sending all traffic to all nodes and preserve source ip) * Request tracing(recently added to ALB) I hope this doesn't sound too negative, and I KNOW you do a TON of work on this stuff, but there often seems a…

Please check the nginx ingress controller (you can use https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/blob/master/addons/ingres... in aws) The only missing piece is "Request tracing(recently added to ALB)"

These are advantages over ELBv1. We have no desire to move away from AWS's load balancing services at this time.

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#22

Post by alexnewman »

Rapzid wrote: post #13
justinsb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - I do a lot of work on Kubernetes on AWS. We definitely have room for improvement - and not just in the glib "there's always room for improvement" way. But: We don't support ALB yet because we haven't actually found a compelling use-case for it. Ingress on Kubernetes seems to do everything ALB can, but without the limitations. At least that's what we've thought so far, so if you have a use case do open an issue e…

I'm not sure the last time the issue was looked at, but I could consolidate some of the benefits that have brought up here: * Websockets support * Http/2 support * Layer 7 routing + Route to specific ports(stop sending all traffic to all nodes and preserve source ip) * Request tracing(recently added to ALB) I hope this doesn't sound too negative, and I KNOW you do a TON of work on this stuff, but there often seems a…

I am not sure why we need anything but the last one. You should be able to do that with k8s

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#23

Post by dastbe »

fapjacks wrote: post #14

I am really glad to see this kind of thing. I built an important project on ECS at the beginning of this year, and it was an extremely frustrating uphill battle, and I consider myself a seven or eight out of ten with containers and container orchestration in general. I wanted so much to enjoy working with ECS, especially because it was the first major Docker project that particular client was working with, and I want…

I remember I had asked you forever ago about what issues you had, so I looked it up and you responded! One thing I don't understand from your response is

Amazon also funnels you into using a single container type per EC2 instance. It's not impossible to use a single EC2 instance for multiple containers, but if you desire to run multiple instances of one specific kind of container on one node, ECS doesn't make the implementation easy for you at all.

Was this related to ELBs and host ports? ELB really isn't a great fit for containers because you attach them to the instance on specific ports, which stops you from running multiple copies of a task on a single instance and also requires a lot of port janitoring between different tasks. ALBs attach via instance:port pairs, so they can actually work as a "container load balancer".

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#24

Post by meddlepal »

Rapzid wrote: post #13
justinsb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - I do a lot of work on Kubernetes on AWS. We definitely have room for improvement - and not just in the glib "there's always room for improvement" way. But: We don't support ALB yet because we haven't actually found a compelling use-case for it. Ingress on Kubernetes seems to do everything ALB can, but without the limitations. At least that's what we've thought so far, so if you have a use case do open an issue e…

I'm not sure the last time the issue was looked at, but I could consolidate some of the benefits that have brought up here: * Websockets support * Http/2 support * Layer 7 routing + Route to specific ports(stop sending all traffic to all nodes and preserve source ip) * Request tracing(recently added to ALB) I hope this doesn't sound too negative, and I KNOW you do a TON of work on this stuff, but there often seems a…

It seems like it would be possible to write a k8s ALB Ingress controller. Prolly a days worth of work for someone that wants it.

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#25

Post by smarterclayton »

meddlepal wrote: post #24
Rapzid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the last time the issue was looked at, but I could consolidate some of the benefits that have brought up here: * Websockets support * Http/2 support * Layer 7 routing + Route to specific ports(stop sending all traffic to all nodes and preserve source ip) * Request tracing(recently added to ALB) I hope this doesn't sound too negative, and I KNOW you do a TON of work on this stuff, but there often seems a…

It seems like it would be possible to write a k8s ALB Ingress controller. Prolly a days worth of work for someone that wants it.

We've discussed doing it for OpenShift - the best reason someone has articulated so far is the automatic SSL cert handling that ALB offers. It's definitely not complex to prototype, so I'm hoping someone does get to it.

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#26

Post by TomFrost »

Thaxll wrote: post #20

Vendor locked on ECS, why would anyone chose that over Mesos / Kubernetes that can run anywhere?

ECS is free in that you pay only for the EC2 nodes running your containers -- there's no need to host ECS or do scheduling on your own hardware to use it. It's also Availability Zone-aware right out of the box, making sure the distribution of container instances is optimized for durability. Finally, it's fully managed. No one needs to maintain or upgrade your ECS implementation.

Granted, there's a lot of advantage to building on top of an infrastructure that can be installed on any hardware from any provider. However, we're not talking about rewriting your applications if you need to move away from ECS; it's all still the same containers. Going from ECS to Mesos or Kubernetes when needed is a matter of writing new config files.

It's a very attractive proposition for small teams on AWS who are trying to spend minimal time on ops.

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#27

Post by gtaylor »

justinsb wrote: post #17
buckhx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GRPC requires http2 which is only supported by ALB and not ELB. Our services are mostly GRPC so lack of ALB means we can't use k8s out of ths box on AWS if that adds any fuel to the fire.

I also want GRPC for my own stuff; ELB will work fine (in TCP mode), but I also want it to work through ingress. My understanding is HTTP2/GRPC support is coming to ingress - that aledbf has already implemented it, and it will be coming to the "official" repo soon; ingress is becoming a top-level project and there's some reshuffling that has to happen, but then aledbf has some great stuff in the pipeline.

When you say "ingress", are you talking about the contrib nginx ingress controller?

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#28

Post by fapjacks »

dastbe wrote: post #23
fapjacks wrote: post #14

I am really glad to see this kind of thing. I built an important project on ECS at the beginning of this year, and it was an extremely frustrating uphill battle, and I consider myself a seven or eight out of ten with containers and container orchestration in general. I wanted so much to enjoy working with ECS, especially because it was the first major Docker project that particular client was working with, and I want…

I remember I had asked you forever ago about what issues you had, so I looked it up and you responded! One thing I don't understand from your response is Amazon also funnels you into using a single container type per EC2 instance. It's not impossible to use a single EC2 instance for multiple containers, but if you desire to run multiple instances of one specific kind of container on one node, ECS doesn't make the imp…

Yes, but actually I just threw in an instance of the jwilder/nginx-proxy for this since it was HTTP-based traffic and needs to be proxied by hostname. I suspect this is similar to what you're describing with ALB, but this goes back to another one of the big reasons I recommend against ECS: Terrible documentation and ##aws on Freenode is not a helpful community. Pretty much any other container orchestration application has a thriving community on Freenode which is indispensable for problems like this. But ##aws is almost exclusively populated by other frustrated users.

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#29

Post by calvins »

dastbe wrote: post #6
addisonj wrote: post #4

One of the more interesting announcements. ECS has seemed like a non starter for any "serious" project for a while, but as someone who has been implementing mesos for the last few months, its pretty interesting that they would prioritize pluggable schedulers rather than getting better feature parity with kubernetes on google cloud. Pluggable schedulers is one of the best features that is missing from kubernetes, swar…

What other features are you missing from ECS?

Not the OP, but I'd really like to be able to run containers with all unnecessary capabilities dropped:

https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent/issues/223

Re: Blox – Open Source Tools for Amazon ECS

#30

Post by dastbe »

fapjacks wrote: post #28
dastbe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember I had asked you forever ago about what issues you had, so I looked it up and you responded! One thing I don't understand from your response is Amazon also funnels you into using a single container type per EC2 instance. It's not impossible to use a single EC2 instance for multiple containers, but if you desire to run multiple instances of one specific kind of container on one node, ECS doesn't make the imp…

Yes, but actually I just threw in an instance of the jwilder/nginx-proxy for this since it was HTTP-based traffic and needs to be proxied by hostname. I suspect this is similar to what you're describing with ALB, but this goes back to another one of the big reasons I recommend against ECS: Terrible documentation and ##aws on Freenode is not a helpful community. Pretty much any other container orchestration applicatio…

Yep, sounds like ALBs would've helped. They were only launched in August 2016 so it sounds like they weren't available when you were doing your project. They just conceptually map better to containers and the documentation has been updated to recommend ALBs unless you need layer4 routing.

Documentation is always a moving target, but the feedback links at the bottom of documents, in the console, and feedback to CS do make it through to service teams who act upon it.

As for Freenode, AWS doesn't maintain an official presence there (same w/ AWS reddit). I understand you're probably looking for something more synchronous/interactive, but the AWS forums ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com ) are the official place for getting public feedback from AWS.

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