"Journey to Containers" - Chet Lintz, Software Engineer at Label Insight 17 JAN Past Meetup AWS Chicago Jan 17, 2018 user group event: Evaluating and using ECS, Docker, and Kubernetes

1. Journey To Containers
Chet Lintz - Software Engineer
clintz@labelinsight.com
Label Insight

2. Who am I?

3. Copyright © 2017 LABEL
INSIGHT
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Who is Label Insight?
Label Insight is the market leader for transparency, enabling access to complete and accurate product
information for more than 400,000 products, representing 80 percent of the top purchased CPG products in
the U.S. The company’s product transparency engine powers data driven solutions for brands, retailers,
researchers, analytics providers, government agencies and consumer applications by capturing and enhancing
data contained on the packaging and labeling of food, pet, and personal care products. Label Insight
customers use this data to provide greater transparency to consumers; easily participate in industry and
government initiatives, such as SmartLabel; create more connected omni-channel experiences; and maximize
category growth potential.

4. ● Amazon Web Services
● Spring Boot
● Terraform
● Microservices (1 service per repo)
● Elastic Beanstalk (Linux + Tomcat)
● CircleCi
Label Insight
Tech

5. Copyright © 2017 LABEL
INSIGHT
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Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Pipeline
● CircleCI
● Controlled by Development and Master branches
in Github
● Development branch kicks off development build
and deploys to Elastic Beanstalk
● Master branch kicks of production build and
deploys to Elastic Beanstalk

6. Copyright © 2017 LABEL
INSIGHT
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Motivation to use Docker
● Promotion of single artifact
● Parent Image for maintaining common config and security
● Environment flexibility
● Orchestration framework benefits
○ Cost savings
○ Scalability
○ Higher resource utilization

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INSIGHT
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First Steps into Docker
Where to Begin?
Spring Boot Application Baby Steps
● WAR File
● Tomcat on Elastic Beanstalk
● JAR embedded tomcat
● Continue using Elastic Beanstalk
● Start with new service
● Convert existing service
● Issues

8. Moving to
Orchestration

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INSIGHT
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The Decision Matrix
Pre Re:Invent 2017 Kubernetes vs Elastic Container Service
● No Fargate
● No Elastic Container Service for
Kubernetes (EKS)
● List of features with weights (1-3)
• 23 features
● Teams evaluate both ECS and
Kubernetes
● Score each feature (1-5) and apply weight
● Evaluate the outcome

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INSIGHT
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Decision Matrix Examples
Feature Weight ECS Kubernetes
Effort to adopt 3 4 (12) 2 (6)
Dev to Prod Promotion 2 4 (8) 5 (10)
Configuration 1 2 (2) 5 (5)
Total 22 (12 + 8 + 2) 21 (6 + 10 + 5)

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INSIGHT
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Architecture Diagram

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INSIGHT
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First Steps
● Manual creation of task definition
● Manual creation of Application Load Balancer
● Knowledge gained was essential for crafting Terraform
modules

13. The
Infrastructure
● Fork of Segment Stack
○ ecs-cluster
○ bastion
○ security-groups
○ iam-role
● Two Application Load Balancers
○ Internal
○ External

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INSIGHT
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Templatizing a Service
● Ease of adoption for teams required to
convert
● Minimize possibility of Terraform
overwriting existing infrastructure
● Sourced Terraform modules allow updates
that span all services
module "ecs_service" {
source = "github.com/FoodEssentials/ecs-service-modules/ecs-service"
service_name = "${var.environment}-${var.service_name}"
docker_image = "${var.docker_image}"
docker_tag = "${var.docker_tag}"
container_cpu = "${var.container_cpu}"
container_memory = "${var.container_memory}"
container_port = "${var.container_port}"
region = "${var.region}"
cluster_name =
"${data.terraform_remote_state.base_remote_state.cluster_name}"
desired_count = "${var.min_capacity}"
ecs_service_role_arn =
"${data.terraform_remote_state.base_remote_state.ecs_service_role_arn}"
target_group_arn = "${module.alb_listener.target_group_arn}"
task_iam_role_arn = "${module.task-iam.task_iam_role}"
}

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INSIGHT
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Local Development Environment
● Docker Compose file with ENV vars for
local/development environment
● Exact representation of application that will
be deployed to cluster
● Can specify dependencies and additional
services

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INSIGHT
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Deployment and Promotion Pipeline
● CircleCI 2.0
● Controlled by Git Tags
● Master branch kicks off build and
development deployment
● Approval step in CircleCI kicks off
production deployment

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INSIGHT
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Tests and Code Review

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INSIGHT
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Git Tag and Build Image

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INSIGHT
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Deploy to Development

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INSIGHT
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Promote to Production

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INSIGHT
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Issues and things we can do better
● Managing secrets
● Path-based routing (example.labelinsight.com/service-name/rest)
● Blue-green deployment

22. What’s Next?

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INSIGHT
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EKS and Fargate
● New decision matrix
● Knowledge gained from deploying to ECS
● Templates enable us to switch quickly
● Running tasks that live until their job completes
● Evaluate other continuous integration options

24. Questions?