REA Systems Engineer practical task

Solution to deploying the Simple Sinatra app

Requirements to provisioning

The solution makes use of AWS, Docker, and Ansible.

The Ansible playbook requires there to be a default AWS user set up in ~/.aws/credentials. The required permissions for the user are as follows:

IAMFullAccess
AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess
AmazonECS_FullAccess
AmazonVPCFullAccess

Docker must be installed and running, and Ansible installed via pip3.

To run and provision

Run ansible-playbook deploy.yml to build and push the Docker container and create and provision the infrastructure in AWS.

Design overview and rationale

The solution utilises Docker, which is pushed to an Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Elastic Container Service will then pull from ECR and run a task to deploy the Docker container to a cluster which runs on an EC2 instance. The EC2 task definition type was chosen since the Fargate type was unable to offer container port forwarding, which was required to forward port 80 to port 9292 the web application utilises.

Docker was chosen since it abstracts away the details of configuring the OS, and its ease of pushing the web server and OS as a self-contained package to a registry. Ansible was used for its ease of use and relatively low learning curve.

Shortfalls and issues

Unfortunately, the script is not functional due to an issue the author ran into with provisioning the EC2 instance with the required machine image ECS requires. As a result, the script fails to set up a working web server on ECS.

The docker push step of the deploy can take a lengthy amount of time, depending on the Internet connection available and upload bandwidth available.

Attributions

These are sources the author consulted to assist with and direct the creation of the Ansible playbook.

Credit to configo Source