The CI/CD and DevOps Blog

Amazon provides a hosted Container Service for Docker called EC2 Container Service (ECS) as part of its container focused suite of services. Many of our customers seem to love the ECR (EC2 Container Registry) and ECS combination to store and run their applications. Amazon ECS can be accessed by going to your AWS Management Console, selecting EC2 Container Service from the list of Services. 

In part I of this series, I demonstrated a simple scenario where we built and pushed a Docker image to ECR as part of the CI build workflow. In this blog post, I will show how you can set up deployment of the same sample application into Amazon ECS, In the last part of this series, I'll show how you can complete your Continuous Delivery pipeline with deployment into subsequent environments, promotion workflows between environments, and release management.

If you want to follow along with the step by step tutorial you can fork our sample, sign in to Shippable, and set up the CI/CD workflow as described. 

We recently added a native integration with JFrog's Artifactory. You can push your versioned package to Artifactory after CI as explained in my previous blog. From Artifactory, you can deploy the package to a Test environment, and then promote the package through various environments and finally to production. You can also pull dependencies from Artifactory as part of your CI/CD workflows on Shippable.

JFrog's Artifactory is one of the most advaced repository managers available today. It is open source and especially popular with Java app developers and also Enterprises that want to self host a repository manager for their projects.You can learn more about Artifactory here.

This blog continues from where the earlier blog Pushing to JFrog Artifactory after CI left off. So it assumes that you have forked the sample project, set up CI, and pushed HelloWorld.war to your Artifactory account. This blog will deploy the WAR file to a beta environment running on a node cluster on Digital Ocean.

In part I of my four part blog series on Microservices, I explained what microservices are and the benefits you will see by adopting this architecture.

However, life is all about tradeoffs. In part II of this series, I will go over the things you need to consider while moving to microservices, as well as some challenges that crop up even when you do everything right.

Microservices for greenfield projects

Anytime your team develops a new application from scratch, it feels great not to inherit technical debt and be locked into outdated decisions made years ago.  Most teams developing new apps today would probably choose to containerize them using Docker and adopt microservices architecture for speed and agility.

As you know, we released our new implementation of continuous deployment pipelines last month. While our basic documentation is up to date, we believe that learning the new pipelines is best done with quick tutorials that demonstrate the power of CD and how easy it is to get started.

We have created a sample project and sample configuration to deploy the project to a test environment,  create a release with semantic versioning, and deploy the project to production. The entire end to end scenario should take less than 30 mins to try out and while you won't learn every little trick, it will definitely make you comfortable with the configuration and how to set things up.

So read on and try it out!

Development practices have come a long way since the time of Waterfall. Development shops have progressed through Agile methodologies and have built a culture of continuously delivering value to their customers, both internally and externally. Many shops have also since implemented Scrum and are experimenting with containerization technologies.