infrastructure automation Archives

I didn’t expect to find myself needing to learn PowerShell for automation purposes, but I must admit I really like it. It seems sort of like an amalgam of Bash, Perl and Python. It’s an unexpectedly impressive creation from Microsoft. I’ve been using PowerShell on macOS but it can also be used easily on Linux, and Windows of course.

I created three simple PowerShell scripts for automated provisioning of Linux EC2 instances within AWS. Running these will provision an Amazon Linux 2 EC2 instance with SSH key pair and Security Group, with a webapp deployed thereon, plus an associated DNS record in Route 53.

You can find these scripts and related config on my GitHub.

I wrote a suite of Ansible playbooks to provision an ECS (Elastic Container Service) cluster on AWS, running a webapp deployed on Docker containers in the cluster and load balanced from an ALB (Application Load Balancer), with the Docker image for the app pulled from an ECR (Elastic Container Registry) repository.

This is a follow-up to my project/article “How to use Ansible to provision an EC2 instance with an app running in a Docker container” which explains how to get a containerised Docker app running on an regular EC2 instance, using Docker Hub as the image repo. That could work well as a simple Staging environment, but for Production it’s desirable to easily cluster and scale the containers with a load balancer, so I came up with this solution for provisioning/deploying on ECS which is well-suited for this kind of flexibility. (To quote AWS: “Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications”.) This solution also uses Amazon’s own ECR for Docker images, rather than Docker Hub.

Tag: infrastructure automation

How to provision an ECS cluster and deploy a webapp on it with load-balanced Docker containers, using Ansible