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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

#71

Post by thoraway1010 »

tybit wrote: post #19
sandGorgon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this - I think internally there is a tussle on what is the strategic way forward. There are so many - Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, EKS, ECS-on-Fargate, EKS-on-Fargate..and of course the huge marketing push for Serverless. They could have the sensible way out and built EKS as the foundation of everything - makes total sense given the massive ecosystem around kubernetes. ECS and Fargate should be killed off. https:/…

AWS doesn’t turn off barely used services, ECS has lots of happy customers that don’t want to deal with Kubernetes. Same goes for Fargate, except that it’s now offered by EKS to, what possible reason would they have too turn it off?

Happy ECS on EC2 and ECS on fargate customer. I'd be really surprised if they turn these off - they just work in a very simple way to get stuff running. I have some "scheduled tasks" in containers, they run on fargate - works great and so easy to update.

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

#72

Post by JAlexoid »

drfritznunkie wrote: post #55
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...

Having spoken with core teams like IAM and Cloudformation teams at length, this appears to an internal AWS organizational issue. Those teams are not responsible for the services integration with them and so they're at the mercy of those teams priorities. But honestly, I think the reason that Cloudformation support isn't as widespread or a top level priority is that it simply exposes the poor architecture and behavior…

It's one of the worst products on AWS. It's so bad, that companies would rather spend engineer's time to avoid it. That's why there are hundreds of products that replicate its functionality.

Has the GUI been fixed to be somewhat useful? Did they migrate from their god awful JSON crap? Can I embed simple infrastructure logic, like automatically adding a group of nodes to a Route53 zone?

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

#73

Post by JAlexoid »

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?

Why? Hashicorp provides them with tooling at no extra cost. Majority of that is free to the end user. Having Hashicorp separate is great for the cloud providers, since they don't have to manage or spend money on Terraform... but still can contribute the code.

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

#74

Post by AaronFriel »

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 think it's a difference in prioritization and how CloudFormation is treated as a separate product as opposed to a fundamental part of releasing features. The other two major cloud providers treat templates as a core part of the release process (now).

As I understand it, the three cloud providers differ in this way:

1. Microsoft Azure releases template/API first - no features can be released unless an Azure Resource Manager template can access it. I think they use ARM templates for their integration testing, as well, but I'm not sure. (If you're an Azure 'softie, please chime in!).

2. Google Cloud Platform releases APIs first - no features are released without extensively being tested via API integrations. They do have a CloudFormation/Azure RM template offering now called Deployment Manager so that my change. (This means that Terraform-like tools can target features quickly, and I have no experience with Deployment Manager but I suspect it does as well.)

3. Amazon AWS releases to the web console first. You might say, "Whoa, what about Bezos' service oriented architecture email?"[1] As far as I know, that's true for internal features. But all user features are exposed through the web console, then wrappers around those APIs are exposed, then, sometimes years later, CloudFormation gains the ability to target those APIs.

For this reason, I trust Microsoft and Google Cloud a lot more to maintain parity between what I can do in Terraform/Pulumi/native template tools and in their web consoles.

[1] - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611, per Bezos: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces."

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

#75

Post by awsanswers »

guitarbill wrote: post #70
awsanswers wrote: post #41

The cloudformation team is small bc the people who run it are not fun to work with and not willing to bring on talent with their own opinions. It's a weird irony, dug in and overall detrimental. The only option teams that need CI/CD for their cloud resources & want to use cloudformation for most of it is to have a side chain process for handling resources that can't be expressed with Cloudformation. (not at all insur…

roughly how many is "small"? 10? 20?

Very small - and to be clear this is not supposed to happen at Amazon or AWS it's "disagree and commit" vs "two pizza team".

It'll suss out eventually but not soon.

Start telling your teams to do what I said above and if anyone tells you "but we want to use one tool" tell them they must grow out of that.

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

#76

Post by devonkim »

gchamonlive wrote: post #58
devonkim wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time people would put applications delivered baked into AMIs as a deployment approach. Using a combination of CloudFormation metadata, Cloudwatch Alarms, cfn-init, and other tools applications could be deployed end to end with a single tool immutably. Many people are stuck with this rather coupled approach because trying to pull it apart would take more effort than is worth to the business. In a lot of si…

indeed then terraform is probably not the right tool and cloudformation is a better suited solution

It’s not an either/or situation for tools thankfully. The author of Terragrunt has even advocated before in a blogpost for using Terraform to deploy CloudFormation stacks to make changes to AutoScaling groups and perform blue-green deployment approaches.

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

#77

Post by tilolebo »

I've been wondering: doesn't CDK depends on CloudFormation, as it basically converts code to CF files? (similar to Troposphere but with more languages supported).

If that's the case,I don't see how CDK stands a chance against Terraform or Pulumi.

And I'm not talking about multi cloud support, but just about the fact that an AWS-managed product, CloudFormation, keeps lagging behind for YEARS for such a core feature of a core AWS service.

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

#78

Post by WatchDog »

friend-monoid wrote: post #37
WatchDog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You also cant use capacity providers with cloudformation yet. Likely due to the fact, that you also cant delete capacity providers, nor change a cluster's default capacity provider.

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

#79

Post by GlennS »

JAlexoid wrote: post #73
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?

Why? Hashicorp provides them with tooling at no extra cost. Majority of that is free to the end user. Having Hashicorp separate is great for the cloud providers, since they don't have to manage or spend money on Terraform... but still can contribute the code.

Because they could focus extra resources on making the Terraform providers for their own products really good. They could have really tight, quick communication channels between the teams building their features and the Terraform team. Much harder to do when you're in separate companies.

Of course, AWS could be doing the same for Cloudwatch, but apparently they're not bothered.

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

#80

Post by dragonwriter »

awsanswers wrote: post #41

The cloudformation team is small bc the people who run it are not fun to work with and not willing to bring on talent with their own opinions. It's a weird irony, dug in and overall detrimental. The only option teams that need CI/CD for their cloud resources & want to use cloudformation for most of it is to have a side chain process for handling resources that can't be expressed with Cloudformation. (not at all insur…

> The only option teams that need CI/CD for their cloud resources & want to use cloudformation for most of it is to have a side chain process for handling resources that can't be expressed with Cloudformation.

CF is extensible through Lambda (which AWS uses itself for the Serverless Application Model), which if you are going to use CF for this is probably what you bought to do to let you use it for everything, rather than having a “side-chain process”.

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