Debian day 4.5: AWS, Cli, dotnet, Docker and ECS

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

In the last few installments, I put Debian on my recycled Proliant ML330 G6, installed all the dev tools I needed and am now tidying up all the deployment loose ends. Deploying a Lambda function to AWS is working, now the bad boy ECS based web service needs to work.

Again, we will be installing a NuGet package into the dotnet environment so we can closely replicate what normally happens in Visual Studio, within Visual Studio Code. There are no handy menus any more, but the command line tools are not difficult and now that I am becoming more familiar with the setup it's quite possible I will automate the entire thing, which is a major bonus.

AWS ECS dotnet tools

Here's the NuGet page, installation is simple:

dotnet tool install --global Amazon.ECS.Tools --version 3.4.2

Once that is done, change into the directory where your already existing Dockerfile is (in this case, from Docker Desktop on windows) and run:

dotnet ecs push-image

or

dotnet ecs deploy-service

It's basically as simple as that. It's not quite the same as right-clicking on the project and having the AWS Explorer do everything, but it's pretty damn close. Note that everything that the dotnet ecs command does will use the aws-ecs-tools-defaults.json file in your project directory, along with your working Docker file. In my case, I also need to go and reconfigure the load balancer to find the new version of the ECS Fargate container but Visual Studio didn't used to do that anyway unless you had your own ec2 instance you were using for ECS.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a NuGet package like AWS.Lambda.Templates so you are probably stuck hand-crafting the aws-ecs-tools-defaults.json at the moment, which is a bummer.

Nothing left to fix, better do some work!

I honestly expected this whole journey to be an exercise in pain but if you stick to the AWS dotnet tools, everything is fairly easy to understand. If you are using Azure or Google Cloud your experience may be very different.

Popular posts from this blog

Tailscale ate my network (and I love it)

Image
No matter where you go, there you are If you're like me, you travel occasionally. Access to your office from home, or from an airport lounge, or from a hotel room is paramount to being productive for most of us now. While I had a fairly simple Tailscale setup that got me into my test machines in the office, what I really wanted was to integrate my AWS production VPC into that system. It's surprisingly simple. Tailscale AWS instructions What do you want to do that for? In the "before tailscale" times, if I needed to test against the production AWS resources or connect dBeaver for database maintenance, I would edit the security group to add my IP address, do my testing, edit the security group to remove myself. This is as error prone as it sounds. I quite often forgot to remove my IP address from the allowed addresses, a major potential security risk when you are travelling. Tailscale has an extremely nifty way to get around it: if you run up a small ec2 ins
Read more

Stupid stunts with WSL2 , Python3 and AWS ECS

Image
Hand rolled CMS system gets a previewer The ongoing process of updating the help system on the SmartShepherd inspired two new features: editing of the html in a temporary location and a small web server to check your work before pushing it to production. The surprise? That GitHub desktop will show you a side-by-side view if you change an image file. Can't believe I didn't notice that before. Can you hold my camel for me? Sometimes I get so far down a dead end I don't realise how many issues could be sorted simply by re-thinking something. The initial deployment of the SmartShepherd web server was to an Elastic Beanstalk setup on AWS, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. Elastic Beanstalk isn't really one product, it's more of an elaborate script that creates systems for you. In my case, it was spinning up a small Windows EC2 instance, installing the .NET Core website and auto-configuring a load balancer to point to that instance. I mean, it's
Read more

Time machine: Solaris 2.6 on QEMU

Image
You can never go home A big chunk of my professional career in the 1990s was spent with a Sparcstation on my desk. Before that the 68000 Sun2 and Sun3 floated past my sticky fingers but the Sparc machines quickly superseded those. I don't remember too much about which ones: pretty sure there was at least one IPX, one Sparcstation 5, a Sparcstation 10 and then the last one was most likely an Ultra 1 or maybe even an Ultra 5. It was a long time ago. Every now and again I think about how productive those machines were and do a little Ebay digging on how much one would be worth to have around. Except I don't have the room for more machines and the idea of trying to revive 25 year old hardware from that era is well beyond my electronic capabilities. Never fear, QEMU is here. Following these excellent instructions from Adafruit , you too can install Solaris 2.6 and have your very own emulated machine. Note that there is one instruction in there I am not sure you need. A
Read more