Here is a detailed summary of the video transcription in markdown format, with the key takeaways broken down into sections for better readability:
Overview of Amazon ECS
- Amazon ECS is a native container orchestration service on AWS that celebrated its 10th birthday this year.
- ECS allows customers to provision workloads in containers on the AWS cloud using the same APIs, tools, and look and feel as other AWS services.
- Customers can run containers on either Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers.
- ECS is a foundational service in AWS, deployed in 34 regions globally, and runs over 2.4 billion tasks per week.
- More than 65% of AWS customers start their container journey with ECS, and over 70% of those choose to use Fargate.
- ECS is not only used by customers but also powers many internal AWS services as a foundational building block.
Availability and Resilience in ECS
Foundational Building Blocks
- AWS regions use a shared-nothing architecture, where each region is completely agnostic of the others.
- Availability zones within a region are failure-isolated data centers, with redundant power and network.
- These region and availability zone constructs are fundamental building blocks for building highly resilient services.
Availability Patterns
- ECS control plane is deployed in every region, with instances in at least three availability zones.
- ECS uses a pre-scaling approach, where services are scaled to 150% of peak demand across availability zones.
- This ensures that if one availability zone fails, the other two can absorb the traffic without service interruption.
- ECS also uses a cellular architecture, where the control plane is partitioned into multiple "cells" within a region, each managing a subset of clusters.
- This contains the blast radius of any software issues or deployments, allowing for faster recovery and rollback.
Resilience through Automation
- ECS uses rolling deployments, where changes are first deployed to a single cell and availability zone, building confidence before expanding.
- ECS monitors deployments and will automatically fail back to the previous known-good version if issues are detected.
- ECS also provides automated availability zone wayaway, where it can detect and automatically route traffic away from a problematic availability zone.
- The AZ rebalance feature automatically rebalances tasks across availability zones if an imbalance is detected.
- ECS supports local container restart, allowing containers to quickly restart on the same host in case of failures, without going through the full control plane.
Continuous Improvement through Chaos Engineering
- ECS runs regular chaos experiments (called "game days") to test the resilience of the service.
- The process involves:
- Preparation: Defining the experiment and expected outcomes.
- Detection: Verifying that the expected behaviors and signals were observed during the experiment.
- Response: Ensuring the right people and automations were engaged to resolve the issue.
- Learning: Conducting a postmortem to identify areas for improvement, both operationally and architecturally.
- ECS uses a "Correction of Errors" (CoE) process to document and track learnings from these experiments and outages.
- CoE focuses on identifying root causes and contributing factors, not on assigning blame.
- The learnings from CoEs have directly influenced the roadmap and development of new ECS features, such as non-blocking I/O and automated availability zone wayaway.
Additional Resources
- There are additional ECS sessions at re:Invent 2022 that attendees are encouraged to check out.
- A QR code is provided that links to a landing page with the presentation deck, related resources, and a recording of the session.