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AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

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Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#31

Post by lozenge »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #13
grubbypaw wrote: post #9

I've never understood CloudFormation's lag time in supporting new service functionality. This launched nearly 3 years ago. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/bluegreen-deployments-w...

Because while "ready" for new features includes API support, it does not include CloudFormation support. The problem is entirely AWS politics and culture.

You would have thought that product teams would love using CloudFormation to create and tear down test resources as it already has code to handle all related resources that they want to interact with (networking objects, DNS, etc)

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#32

Post by GlennS »

grubbypaw wrote: post #9

I've never understood CloudFormation's lag time in supporting new service functionality. This launched nearly 3 years ago. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/bluegreen-deployments-w...

I wonder why none of the big cloud providers has bought Hashicorp.

It seems like a really obvious move to me?

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#33

Post by derex »

GlennS wrote: post #32
grubbypaw wrote: post #9

I've never understood CloudFormation's lag time in supporting new service functionality. This launched nearly 3 years ago. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/bluegreen-deployments-w...

I wonder why none of the big cloud providers has bought Hashicorp. It seems like a really obvious move to me?

I don’t have revenue breakdown on AWS orgs to back this up but I suspect CloudFormation isn’t one of the money printing products so it’s hard to justify investments as large as acquiring Hashicorp.

This is despite the obvious role of CloudFormation as a productivity multiplier inside the AWS world

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#34

Post by laminatedsmore »

The list of restrictions in the user guide seems painful - cannot be used in the same template as nested stacks, cannot start a blue green deploy if other infrastructure would be modified at the same time, cannot import properties from other stacks, cannot export output properties. I was interested, but can't imagine using it with these restrictions.

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#35

Post by WatchDog »

vazamb wrote: post #4
ciguy wrote: post #2

The ECS default deployment model is quite frankly a disaster. I've written many Python/Go scripts over the years to wrangle it into a sensible form for CI/CD. Good to see that they're working on it, but I don't know why they don't fix the underlying paradigm instead of making it Cloudformation exclusive.

I would love to know what the problem is. We do dozen of deployments every week with a ALB + ECS + Fargate setup. We upload a new container image, create a new task and launch as many tasks as desired (so if we want 2 containers running we launch 2, for a total of 4). ALB calls the /health endpoints on the new containers and if they pass the healthchecks it drains connections to the old containers and stops the tasks…

I find ECS particularly, ECS on EC2, to be really painful for small deployments.

I just want a cluster that scales in and out to the amount of memory my tasks need, I'm not very concerned about CPU. Until capacity providers it was more or less impossible to do so without having a bunch of excess capacity provisioned. Even with capacity providers, I can't seem to get a cluster to scale in to 0 instances when no tasks are needed.

I have one ECS service that requires an EBS volume mount, which means that when the task definition is updated, I need the service to stop, so that the new task can mount the same volume. This deployment model is essentially impossible without implementing a custom deployment strategy.

Fargate makes things a bit easier, and now that you can use EFS volumes with it it might make more sense. But overall, everything in ECS just seems poorly designed, clunky and hacky, like many AWS products.

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#36

Post by _ix »

derex wrote: post #33
GlennS wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why none of the big cloud providers has bought Hashicorp. It seems like a really obvious move to me?

I don’t have revenue breakdown on AWS orgs to back this up but I suspect CloudFormation isn’t one of the money printing products so it’s hard to justify investments as large as acquiring Hashicorp. This is despite the obvious role of CloudFormation as a productivity multiplier inside the AWS world

That’s an interesting point, but Hashicorp does a fair bit more than just Terraform.

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#37

Post by friend-monoid »

WatchDog wrote: post #35
vazamb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know what the problem is. We do dozen of deployments every week with a ALB + ECS + Fargate setup. We upload a new container image, create a new task and launch as many tasks as desired (so if we want 2 containers running we launch 2, for a total of 4). ALB calls the /health endpoints on the new containers and if they pass the healthchecks it drains connections to the old containers and stops the tasks…

I find ECS particularly, ECS on EC2, to be really painful for small deployments. I just want a cluster that scales in and out to the amount of memory my tasks need, I'm not very concerned about CPU. Until capacity providers it was more or less impossible to do so without having a bunch of excess capacity provisioned. Even with capacity providers, I can't seem to get a cluster to scale in to 0 instances when no tasks…

You can’t do EFS on Fargate in CloudFormation yet though.

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#38

Post by tbrock »

ciguy wrote: post #2

The ECS default deployment model is quite frankly a disaster. I've written many Python/Go scripts over the years to wrangle it into a sensible form for CI/CD. Good to see that they're working on it, but I don't know why they don't fix the underlying paradigm instead of making it Cloudformation exclusive.

Really? We’ve been using it for 3 years and it works fine. Make sure you pay attention to min/max task settings.

There are basically three ways to do it:

Min less than max, max is 100.

Max greater than min, min is 100.

Some combination of the two.

For the first you take down running tasks first and then backfill with new (green) tasks.

For the second you add green tasks and once stable take down blue.

Make sure that if you only have two tasks that min/max move in 50% increments: I.e you can’t scale up/down to 125%/75% but can to 150%/50%.

Re: AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS

#39

Post by scarface74 »

gtsteve wrote: post #27
grubbypaw wrote: post #9

I've never understood CloudFormation's lag time in supporting new service functionality. This launched nearly 3 years ago. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/bluegreen-deployments-w...

I understand the logic of not waiting for the CloudFormation team to do their work because it could introduce delays but it makes it a considerably less useful tool. When considering Terraform vs CloudFormation I certainly took that into account and that's why I don't use CloudFormation for anything. I wonder if there are any killer features of CloudFormation I missed when I looked into this (years ago now).

- AWS Business Support Plan

- The ability to configure everything about a lambda and export the template.

- Serverless Application Model tooling

- Quick Create Links - you can give out a link to developers that let them create infrastructure by using CF and just enter parameters. You can restrict them to only being able to create a stack that you specify.

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