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Streamline container application networking with built-in Amazon ECS support in Amazon VPC Lattice

Published Date
Author Donnie Prakoso

Since its launch, Amazon VPC Lattice has streamlined complex networking tasks. As a result, my perspective on how to build and connect modern, multi-service applications has changed. As my colleague Danilo wrote in his post announcing the general availability of VPC Lattice:

“By using VPC Lattice, you can focus on your application logic and improve productivity and deployment flexibility with consistent support for instances, containers, and serverless computing.”

Today, we’re announcing Amazon VPC Lattice built-in support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). With this new built-in integration, Amazon ECS services can now be directly associated with VPC Lattice target groups without the need for intermediate load balancers.

Here’s a quick look at how you can find Amazon VPC Lattice integration while creating an Amazon ECS service:

The Amazon VPC Lattice integration with Amazon ECS works by registering and deregistering IP addresses from ECS tasks within a service as targets in a VPC Lattice target group. As ECS tasks for the service are launched, Amazon ECS will automatically register those tasks to the VPC Lattice target group.

Furthermore, if ECS tasks fail VPC Lattice health checks, Amazon ECS will automatically replace the tasks. Also, if any task is terminated or scales down, it’s removed from the target group.

Using the Amazon VPC Lattice integration
Let me walk you through how to use this new integration. In the following demo, I will deploy a simple application server running as an ECS service and configure the integration with VPC Lattice. Then, I’ll test the application server by connecting to the VPC Lattice domain name without having to configure additional load balancers on Amazon ECS.

Before I can start with this integration, I need to make sure Amazon ECS will have the required permissions to register and deregister targets into VPC Lattice. To learn more, please visit the Amazon ECS infrastructure IAM role documentation page.

To use the integration with VPC Lattice, I need to define a task definition with at least one container and one port mapping. This is an example of my task definition.

{
    "containerDefinitions": [
        {
            "name": "webserver",
            "image": "public.ecr.aws/ecs-sample-image/amazon-ecs-sample:latest",
            "cpu": 0,
            "portMappings": [
                {
                    "name": "web-80-tcp",
                    "containerPort": 80,
                    "hostPort": 80,
                    "protocol": "tcp",
                    "appProtocol": "http"
                }
            ],
            ...
            *redacted for brevity*
}

Then, I navigate to my ECS cluster and choose Create.

Next, I need to select the task definition and assign the service name.

In the VPC Lattice integration section, I choose Turn on VPC Lattice to start configuring the target group for VPC Lattice. I don’t need to specify a load balancer because I’ll use VPC Lattice. By default, VPC Lattice will use a round-robin routing algorithm to route requests to healthy targets.

Now, I can start defining the integration for my ECS service in VPC Lattice. First, I select the infrastructure role for Amazon ECS. Then, I need to select the virtual private cloud (VPC) where I want my service to run. After that, I need to define the Target groups that will receive traffic. After I’m done configuring the service with VPC Lattice integration, I create this service.

After a few minutes, I have my ECS service ready. I navigate to the service and choose Configuration and networking. If I scroll down to the VPC Lattice section, I can see the VPC Lattice target group created.

To get more information on this target group, I select the target group name, which will redirect me to the VPC Lattice target group page. Here, I can see that Amazon ECS successfully registered the IP address of the running task.

Now, I need to create a VPC Lattice service and service network. My preference is always to create the VPC Lattice service then associate with the VPC Lattice service network later on. So, let’s do that.

I choose Services under the VPC Lattice section and choose Create service.

I fill in all the details required to create a VPC Lattice service and choose Next.

Then, I add a listener, and for the Forward to target group on the Listener default action, I select the newly created target group.

On the next page, because I’m going to create the VPC Lattice service network later, I skip this step and choose Next, review the configurations, and create the service.

With VPC Lattice service created, now it’s time to create VPC Lattice service networks. I navigate to Service networks under the VPC Lattice section and choose Create service network.

First, I fill the VPC Lattice service network name.

Then, on the Service associations page, I select the service that I have created.

I associate this service network to my VPC as well as the security group.

For the simplicity of this demo, I set None for the Auth type. However, I highly recommend you to read how you can use IAM to manage access to VPC Lattice. Then, I choose Create service network.

At this stage, we have everything setup for this integration. My VPC Lattice service network is now associated with my VPC Lattice service and my VPC.

With everything set up, I copy the Domain name from my VPC Lattice service page.

Then, to access the service, I log in to the instance in the same VPC and call the service by using the domain name from VPC Lattice.

[ec2-user@ ~]$ curl http://service-a-XYZ.XYZ.vpc-lattice-svcs.XYZ.on.aws

"Hello there! I'm Amazon ECS."

One thing to note is if you’re not receiving traffic to your Amazon ECS workloads, check the security groups as described in the Control traffic in VPC Lattice using security groups documentation page.

I’m personally excited about this integration because it unlocks various possibilities while streamlining application architectures and improving overall system reliability. Now that all AWS compute types are inherently supported in VPC Lattice, I can unify services across all my ECS clusters, AWS accounts, and VPCs.

Things to know
Here are a couple of important points to note:

Try this new capability of Amazon VPC Lattice today and see how it can streamline your container application communication running on Amazon ECS.

Happy building!

— Donnie Prakoso