Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Container Service (101)

Docker is a technology that has been making waves in the IT world for several years now.

All major public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) offer a more or less integrated solution for container management. In this series of articles, we explain how to successfully get started with the managed Amazon EC2 Container Service.

This series assumes that you have created an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) where the host instances for Docker containers will be created, that the AWS CLI is installed on your machine, and we will use a "Hello-world" image (dockercloud/hello-world) available on Docker Hub.

1 - Creating a Private Docker Repository (ECR)

To be deployed, a container image must be made available in a Docker repository. Several solutions are available. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a managed private repository (ECR) at an attractive price (US$0.1/GB/month as of 01/08/2017).

To deploy our image on ECR (Amazon EC2 Container Registry), we will first pull this image from Docker Hub.

docker pull dockercloud/hello-world

Now that we have our image, we will push it to ECR. Let's connect to the AWS web console for ECS.

1.1a – If you haven't used the service yet

You will land on the "Get Started" page. Simply click the blue "Get Started" button in the middle of the page. On the next screen (Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Container Service), uncheck the box to skip deploying the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) demo (sample).

1.1b – If you have already used ECS

Simply click on Repositories then on "Create Repository".

1.2 – On the next page

You can name your repository — helloworld in our case. Then proceed to the next step (Next step).

1.3 – The last page

It provides all the instructions for using the newly created repository.

2 – Pushing an Image to ECR

We will push our HelloWorld image to the repository. To do this, we will log in to ECR from our machine (our repository is in Ireland).

aws ecr get-login --no-include-email --region eu-west-1
 docker login -u AWS -p eyJwRXl…...iMSIsZnR5cGUKOiJEQWRBX0tFWSJ8 https://123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

We get a command line that will allow us to connect to ECR.

docker login -u AWS -p eyJwRXl…...iMSIsZnR5cGUKOiJEQWRBX0tFWSJ8 https://123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
 Login Succeeded

We are now connected and can push the local image.

docker tag dockercloud/hello-world:latest 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/helloworld:latest
docker push 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/helloworld:latest

If you connect to the AWS web console, you will be able to see your image in the repository.

In the next article, we will use this image to launch a Docker container on ECS.