Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Scaling containers from one user to millions (CON407)

Summary

• Speakers: Abhishek Nautial (Senior Product Manager, Amazon Elastic Containers Team) and Mahesh Iyer (Developer Advocate, ECS and Container Services).
• Overview of Amazon ECS: ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that requires no control plane management. It supports a variety of compute options and is highly scalable and performant.
• ECS Scale and Performance: ECS supports over 2 billion task launches weekly and can handle massive workloads, including a single account production workload with over 5 million concurrent vCPUs.
• Scaling Considerations: When scaling applications, consider application-specific units and map these to ECS task resource requirements. Also, consider the underlying compute infrastructure scalability.
• Compute Options: AWS Fargate is recommended for serverless compute, while EC2 is suggested for more control over instance selection and customization. Capacity providers are recommended for managing EC2 compute capacity.
• Service Quotas and Throttling: Be aware of service quotas and API throttling. Use CloudTrail and CloudWatch to monitor and manage throttling events.
• Performance Optimization Tips: Optimize health check intervals and thresholds, use task scaling protection, optimize container image sizes, and choose the correct network mode and instance type for your workload.
• Sample Application: A hypothetical scenario was discussed to demonstrate how to scale an application to support 1 million requests, considering various AWS service quotas and best practices.
• Resources: Links to blog posts and best practices guides were provided for further reading.

Insights

• ECS Adoption: ECS is trusted by a wide range of customers, including Capital One, Disney, Instacart, DoorDash, and Ubisoft, indicating its reliability and versatility for different workloads.
• Serverless vs. EC2: Fargate is preferred for simplicity and managed infrastructure, while EC2 offers more customization and control, especially for resource-intensive workloads.
• Capacity Providers: They are a key feature for managing EC2 compute capacity, allowing for auto-scaling of instances to match task load changes.
• API Throttling Management: Built-in retry mechanisms in AWS SDKs help manage API throttling, but custom scripts may require additional logic to handle throttling events.
• Load Balancer Optimization: Adjusting health check intervals and thresholds can significantly speed up the scaling process.
• Container Image Optimization: For Fargate, optimizing image sizes and keeping images local to the region can improve task launch times.
• Cellular Architecture: For applications that need to scale beyond certain hard limits, a cellular architecture can be considered, although it introduces additional complexity and engineering overhead.
• Continuous Improvement: ECS has seen performance improvements over time, often without requiring any action from customers, demonstrating AWS's commitment to enhancing the service in the background.