Deploy a Node.js app to AWS ECS+ECR+ELB quickly using PostgreSQL

IaSQL is an open-source software tool that creates a two-way connection between an unmodified PostgreSQL database and an AWS account so you can manage your infrastructure from a database. In this post, we're going to discover an IaSQL module that's built to make deploying to ECS, simplified. Most of the details for deploying a container to AWS ECS are the same (load balancers, security groups, IAM roles, etc), and we have created the aws_ecs_simplified module for you so that you can give it any Github repo with a Dockerfile and get your app deployed to ECS in the fastest time possible, with scalability available! All the needed resources are going to be created automatically in your AWS account, and you'll have full access to the details while you're gaining the benefit of a higher-level simple deployment.

If you have ever tried to deploy your containerized application to ECS, you know that it's not going to be an easy click-to-deploy journey. To get your application up and running on ECS, you have to go through a bunch of resource creation. You'll need to:

• Deploy a load balancer as the point-of-contact for your app
• Create a target group for the load balancer and register the ECS tasks in it
• Add a new listener to your load balancer and connect it to the target group
• Create a security group, and you need to allow the port your app is listening on in that security group
• Attach the security group above to your load balancer
• Create a CloudWatch log group for your ECS task
• Create an ECS cluster, and definitely the task definition as well
• Oh, and create an ECR repository to push your images to be run on the container

I'm not going to continue this long list, since I've already got a headache. Doing those steps manually is going to give you a headache as well, so why bother doing all those steps yourself and risking different errors you might face when deploying your containerized app? You don't really have the time for the random IAM-related errors AWS is demanding you to resolve. Besides, you already have your codebase ready and the Dockerfile is there, so why not just run a simple command doing something that should be simply done?

An Example Usage of the aws_ecs_simplified Module

Let's say we are going to deploy this simple Express.js app to the ECS. It has a Dockerfile and package.json that installs express on npm install. npm start then starts the Express server which listens on port 8088.

aws_ecs_simplified is a high-level module we have created to make scalable ECS deployments easier. For more info on high-level vs low-level modules, you can check this guide.

Let's go and deploy the above app to your AWS account. Don't worry if you don't have an IaSQL database already, you can run IaSQL locally and run one locally for free here.

SELECT
  iasql_install ('aws_ecs_simplified', 'aws_codebuild');

SELECT
  iasql_begin ();

INSERT INTO
  ecs_simplified (app_name, app_port, image_tag, public_ip)
VALUES
  ('simple-express', 8088, 'latest', TRUE);

SELECT
  iasql_commit ();

SELECT
  ecr_build (
    'https://github.com/iasql/iasql/', -- the Github repo URL
    (
      SELECT
        id
      FROM
        repository
      WHERE
        repository_name = 'simple-express-repository'
    )::VARCHAR(255), -- ECR repo for the image to be pushed
    './examples/ecs-fargate/prisma/app', -- the subdirectory in Github repo
    'main', -- the Github branch or ref
    NULL -- Github personal access token - can be omitted if public repository
  );

That's it! Now wait for some time and your app is deployed! While your app is being deployed, let's go through the commands we executed in more depth:

SELECT
  iasql_install ('aws_ecs_simplified', 'aws_codebuild');

• This command installs the aws_ecs_simplified high-level module. We– at IaSQL– have created that module to make it easy to deploy containerized apps to ECS. The code for it is here. But IaSQL is so flexible that anyone can create their own high-level (and of course, low-level) modules and add it to IaSQL.

INSERT INTO
  ecs_simplified (app_name, app_port, image_tag, public_ip)
VALUES
  ('simple-express', 8088, 'latest', TRUE);

• This command creates a new ecs_simplified app by inserting a new row into the ecs_simplified table. Seems pretty easy, right? But under the hood, it's creating all the necessary resources like load balancers, security groups, IAM roles, etc.
• You can manually check the tables to see what resources are being created. For example, looking at the load_balancer table you'll see a load balancer named simple-express-load-balancer is inserted automatically by running the above insert command.
• The iasql_begin() and iasql_commit() functions are IaSQL RPCs that are used to start and then end a transaction. We use those two functions to bundle changes to be pushed to the cloud immediately. If you don't wrap the changes in a transaction, they'll be applied to the cloud in an eventually-consistent way.
• For more info on the iasql_begin() and iasql_commit() commands, check this guide on how it works.
• After the transaction is finished all the necessary resources are now created on the cloud, and their cloud-defined values are synced back to the database, so you can see the ARNs in the database. You can verify this by looking at different tables, eg. iam_role.
• To get your load balancer address, you can easily run SELECT load_balancer_dns FROM ecs_simplified WHERE app_name = 'simple-express' query and get the URL to access your app.
• Now ECS is waiting for an image to be pushed to your ECR repository to run it. You can get the URI for the ECR repository by running the SELECT repository_uri FROM ecs_simplified WHERE app_name = 'simple-express' query. You could build your docker image locally and then follow Steps 2 and 4 from this guide to connect your local docker CLI to your ECR repository and push that docker image into your ECR repository, but we have a simpler solution next.
• In the next step, we'll automatically build an image for the code in Github repo and then push it to this URI (all through SQL and using another high-level function named ecr_build).

SELECT
  ecr_build (
    'https://github.com/iasql/iasql/', -- the Github repo URL
    (
      SELECT
        id
      FROM
        repository
      WHERE
        repository_name = 'simple-express-repository'
    )::VARCHAR(255), -- ECR repo for the image to be pushed
    './examples/ecs-fargate/prisma/app', -- the subdirectory in Github repo
    'main', -- the Github branch or ref
    NULL -- Github personal access token - can be omitted if public repository
  );

• This command tells IaSQL to clone the iasql repository, build an image on the subdirectory specified, and then push it to the ECR repository created earlier by the aws_ecs_simplified module. Running the above command will automatically create a CodeBuild project and the related roles, etc. Then it'll start a build, and after it's successful all the created resources are deleted to ensure there won't be any additional charges to your AWS account.
• To access your app on the cloud, get the load balancer address and use your browser to access the live version of it:

SELECT
  load_balancer_dns
FROM
  ecs_simplified
WHERE
  app_name = 'simple-express';

Then you can check if the server is running on the <load_balancer_dns value>:8088/health address.

Low-level Access to Resources

So the aws_ecs_simplified module simplifies things, right? But what if you still need the level of control you had when you were doing all the steps manually? The traditional PaaS trade-off is that you can't grow your app beyond the built-in limitations as you don't have access to all the small details. The IaSQL approach is not limited in that way.

Let's say you want your ECS container to be able to use the AWS CLI to provision an EC2 instance, and for that purpose its IAM role needs AmazonEC2FullAccess policy to work properly. aws_ecs_simplified does not have a column to configure such a thing, but that doesn't mean we're stuck.

The good news is that you still have the full control over all resources in the deepest details. Let's fix your app's IAM role access by attaching the needed policy to its IAM role:

UPDATE
  iam_role
SET
  attached_policies_arns = attached_policies_arns || 'arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2FullAccess' -- attached_policies_arns is of text[] type
WHERE
  role_name = 'simple-express-ecs-task-exec-role';

You want additional rules for the container's security group? No problem! Just write the SQL and execute it, and it will be applied to the cloud within seconds. You want 3 copies of your container to be kept running with a round-robin load balancing on them? It's already there, just do an UPDATE ecs_simplified SET desired_count = 3 WHERE app_name = 'simple_express'; and it's there for you.

With IaSQL and its flexibility, you can benefit from both the high-level and low-level operations. We have created the aws_ecs_simplified module to show the flexibility and power of IaSQL, but the possibilities are endless. IaSQL is also an open-source project, meaning that you can use it to build your very own modules on top of it. If you're into the idea of empowering other developers to do complex infrastructure tasks simply, why don't you take a look at our contributing guide and join our Discord channel? We'll thoroughly answer any of your questions regarding the usage or development of IaSQL. Looking forward to seeing you in our small, but great community.