DEVOPSdigest

Docker announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to simplify the lives of developers by allowing them to focus on application development, streamlining the process of deploying and managing containers in AWS from their local development environment.

Docker and AWS have created an integrated and frictionless experience for developers to leverage Docker Compose, Docker Desktop, and Docker Hub to deploy their apps on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

Previously, taking a local Docker Compose file and running it on Amazon ECS posed a challenge because of constructs in Amazon ECS that were not part of the Docker Compose specification, but were necessary for the application to run in AWS. Docker and AWS collaborated to build a simplified workflow that allows developers to quickly and easily switch from running containers in a local Docker Desktop environment to Amazon ECS. This provides developers an easy path to running highly secure and scalable production applications in Amazon ECS.

“This is a big step toward giving developers the best experience building, sharing, and running cloud-native apps with Docker and Amazon ECS,” said Docker CEO Scott Johnston. “This experience allows developers to work locally and take the same experience into a production-scale cloud service with Amazon ECS, reducing the span of knowledge needed and accelerating their time to production.”

“With a large number of containers being built using Docker, we’re very excited to work with Docker to simplify the developer's experience of building and deploying containerized applications to AWS,” said Deepak Singh, VP, Compute Services, AWS. “Now customers can easily deploy their containerized applications from their local Docker environment straight to Amazon ECS. This accelerated path to modern application development and deployment allows customers to focus more effort on the unique value of their applications, and less time on figuring out how to deploy to the cloud."

The core challenge Docker has looked to address is creating a path for developers seeking a simple way to start developing apps locally in Docker and deploying them to Amazon ECS. The lack of this experience has resulted in divergent approaches and an increased span of knowledge required to use almost identical manifests to deploy the same container workload locally and on Amazon ECS. This increases time and effort to move workloads into the cloud. This solution gives developers a simplified workflow that allows them to use the Docker CLI and Docker Compose to start locally and run their multi-container apps straight through to deployment from Docker Hub to Amazon ECS.

Other benefits of this solution include the following:

- Developers can leverage the knowledge they already have about Docker and the apps they have defined with Docker Compose to accelerate their ability to deploy in the cloud.

- Native integration between Docker and Amazon ECS allows customers to more smoothly target Amazon ECS for their multi-container deployments.

- Docker Compose, the preferred developer’s tool for defining multi-container applications, is an open source specification with open governance. The initiative will therefore provide the wider community of new and existing users with transparency, allowing them input into the future direction of the specification as well as Docker Compose-based tools.