Workshops: Running Laravel on AWS ECS

These workshops assume that we will have multiple workloads on both production and staging environments. We will achieve this goal step by step, section by section.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) allows us to easily run, scale, and secure Docker container applications on AWS, which is very suitable for a developer or a team lacking of dedicated time to take care about infrastructure.

Highlights

We will use as latest Laravel LTS version as possible. We will use Laravel v6.18.35 at the moment.
Using dwchiang/nginx-php-fpm as the docker base image to simplify the container configuration works and make us focusing on the Laravel application-first.
Using AWS CDK to define our own cloud infrastructure as code (IaC) in a programming language.

Preparations

Please well prepare the preparations before attending the workshop.

Having an IAM user with AdministratorAccess policy (or an AWS Root Account (not recommended))
- Check: AWS Access Key Id
- Check: AWS Secret Access Key
- Please DO NOT commit your AWS Access Key Id and/or AWS Secret Access Key into version control repository.
Having git.
- Check: git --version
```
❯ git --version
git version 2.29.1
```
git clone this repository to your local machine: git clone git@github.com:dwchiang/laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops.git
Having GNU Make.
- Check: make -v
```
❯ make -v
GNU Make 3.81
```

Having tree command.

Check: tree --version

❯ tree --version
tree v1.8.0 (c) 1996 - 2018 by Steve Baker, Thomas Moore, Francesc Rocher, Florian Sesser, Kyosuke Tokoro

Having AWS CLI v2 installed and configured with at least one profile name.

Check: aws --version

❯ aws --version
aws-cli/2.0.59 Python/3.9.0 Darwin/19.6.0 source/x86_64

Tranditional Way
- Please create a profile named laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops for this workshop in your AWS CLI v2. (If you are not using the same profile name, please update the profile name in the export-variables file of each section folder or your project repo folder.)
- Check: ~/.aws/credentials
```
[laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops]
aws_access_key_id = AKIAxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key =
```
- Check: ~/.aws/config
  - Recommended to choose a region that supports EC2 t4g instance type (ARM).
```
[profile laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops]
region = us-west-2
output = json
cli_pager =
```

AWS SSO Way

Enable AWS SSO in AWS Organizations and AWS SSO in AWS Management Console. Create an SSO user and grant admin permissions on the user.

Then you can login with this SSO account in AWS CLI:

# configure AWS SSO in your AWS CLI
❯ aws configure sso --profile laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops
SSO start URL [None]: https://your-sso-portal-short-name.awsapps.com/start                                                             
SSO Region [None]: us-west-2 #please change to use the corresponding region of your AWS SSO                                                                                         
Attempting to automatically open the SSO authorization page in your default browser.
If the browser does not open or you wish to use a different device to authorize this request, open the following URL:

https://device.sso.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

Then enter the code:

HRCB-WSLR
There are 6 AWS accounts available to you.
Using the account ID 123456789012
The only role available to you is: AdministratorAccess
Using the role name "AdministratorAccess"
CLI default client Region [None]: us-west-2                                                                          
CLI default output format [None]: json                                                                               

To use this profile, specify the profile name using --profile, as shown:

aws s3 ls --profile laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops

# refrech credentials into your ~/.aws/credentials
❯ ./utils/refresh_aws_credentials.sh laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops
=> requesting temporary credentials
=> updating ~/.aws/credentials as profile laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops
[OK] done

Having jq to parse json outputs from AWS CLI.
- Check: jq --version
```
❯ jq --version
jq-1.6
```

Having Docker on your local machine.

Check: docker -v

❯ docker -v
Docker version 19.03.12, build 48a66213fe

Having composer on your local machine to install Laravel.
- Check: composer -V
```
❯ composer -V
Composer version 1.10.13 2020-09-09 11:46:34
```
Having Node.js and npm on your local machine. You may use nvm (Node Version Manager) to easily manage multiple versions.
- Check: node -v
```
❯ node -v
v12.19.0
```
- Check: npm -v
```
❯ npm -v
6.14.8
```
- (Optional) Check: nvm ls
Having AWS CDK
- Check : cdk --version
Having a domain name you can manage. (e.g adding a new CNAME record for it.)
- Required since section 4.

Getting Started

You don't need to know or learn about AWS ECS, EC2, Fargate, or even CDK before our diving deeper, you can still enjoy the getting started sections. You only need to have an AWS account or an IAM account. We will guide you to know each parts of this architecture in the later sections.

The first two sections is getting to know there are two launch types in Amazon ECS:

Section 1: Getting Started on ECS Fargate Launch Type
Section 2: Getting Started on ECS EC2 Launch Type

Then we move on to introduce fundamental requirements for running a Laravel service on Amazon ECS:

Section 3: Prepare a project repository
Section 4: Using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to deploy SSL/TLS certificates
Section 5: Enable Laravel Logging
Section 6: Handling Environment Variables

Architecture Overview

The workshops will go through from running single app on Fargate to multiple apps on ECS Capacity Provider across Fargate and EC2 launch types by using AWS CDK to define our own cloud infrastructure as code (IaC).