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README.md

linkerd on Amazon ECS

This example demonstrates deploying linkerd on an AWS ECS cluster, using Consul for service discovery.

Full instructions can be found in the Getting Started: Running in ECS Guide.

Amazon ECS is a container management service. This guide will demonstrate routing and monitoring your services using Linkerd in ECS.

Overview

This guide will demonstrate setting up Linkerd as a service mesh, Consul for service discovery, a hello-world sample app, and linkerd-viz for monitoring, all on a fresh ECS cluster.

The following components make up the system:

  • ECS: Docker container management. Every ECS instance runs the following Docker containers:
    • linkerd: proxies requests to hello-world
    • consul-agent: local service discovery agent
    • consul-registrator: bridge between Docker and Consul, automatically registers services with consul
  • hello-world: example ECS task deployed separately from foundational ECS+linkerd+consul-agent configuration, composed of hello, world, and world-v2 services
  • linkerd-viz: ECS task deployed separately from foundational ECS+linkerd+consul-agent configuration, provides a monitoring dashboard for all service traffic
  • consul-server: service discovery back-end, runs on a single EC2 instance

Initial Setup

First, launch a cluster of EC2 instances orchestrated by ECS. You can use a CloudFormation template to create a VPC, security group, and autoscaling group for launching EC2 instances configured to connect to ECS. You can download or clone the linkerd-examples repo to get the template.

Open the CloudFormation console and deploy the linkerd-ecs-cluster.yml template or if you have the AWS CLI installed and configured run:

KEY_PAIR=<MY KEY PAIR NAME>

aws cloudformation deploy \
  --stack-name linkerd-ecs-cluster \
  --template-file linkerd-ecs-cluster.yml \
  --parameter-overrides KeyName=$KEY_PAIR \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

The next thing needed is a Consul server, and the linkerd, consul-agent, and consul-registrator daemons. These can be deployed using the linkerd-daemons.yml template:

aws cloudformation deploy \
  --stack-name linkerd-daemons \
  --template-file linkerd-daemons.yml \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

Register Task Definitions

Now we have an ECS cluster that is running all the daemons necessary for Linkerd to function. We can run a Linkerd enabled application in the cluster. First we need to register some task definitions that describe how to configure and boot the application.

aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://linkerd-viz-task-definition.json
aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://hello-world-task-definition.json

Deploy hello-world

Now that all our foundational services are deployed and the task definitions are available, we can deploy a sample app. The hello-world task is composed of a hello service, a world service, and a world-v2 service. To demonstrate inter-service communication, we configure the hello service to call the world service, via linkerd.

aws ecs run-task --cluster l5d-demo --task-definition hello-world --count 2

Note that we have deployed two instances of hello-world, which results in two hello containers, two world containers, and two world-v2 containers.

Test everything worked

First we need to create an SSH tunnel to the cluster. The following commands will choose one of the EC2 hosts, and forward traffic on three local ports to three remote ports on the EC2 host:

  • Traffic to localhost:9990 will go to the Linkerd dashboard on the remote host
  • Traffic to localhost:8500 will go to the Consul admin dashboard on the remote host
  • Traffic to localhost:4140 will go to the Linkerd HTTP proxy on the remote host

Note that if one of these four ports is already in use on your local machine you will either have to stop whatever software if using that port, or you can eliminate the port collision by replacing the local port number with another unused port number in the SSH tunnel command as well as all subsequent commands.

# Select an ECS node
ECS_NODE=$( \
  aws ec2 describe-instances \
    --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running Name=tag:Name,Values=l5d-demo-ecs \
    --query 'Reservations[0].Instances[0].PublicDnsName' \
    --output text \
)

ssh -i "~/.ssh/$KEY_PAIR.pem" \
    -L 127.0.0.1:4140:$ECS_NODE:4140 \
    -L 127.0.0.1:9990:$ECS_NODE:9990 \
    -L 127.0.0.1:8500:$ECS_NODE:8500 ec2-user@$ECS_NODE -N

The SSH tunnel is now launched. As long as it runs you will be able to access the remote Linkerd HTTP proxy, Linkerd Dashboard, and Consul dashboard as if they were on your local host:

# view Linkerd and Consul UIs (osx)
open http://localhost:9990
open http://localhost:8500

Lets use the tunnel to send some requests to the helloworld service via the Linkerd HTTP proxy:

# test routing via Linkerd
http_proxy=localhost:4140 curl hello
Hello (172.31.20.160) World (172.31.19.35)!!

You will see these requests reflected in the Linkerd dashboard. The request flow we just tested:

curl -> linkerd -> hello -> linkerd -> world

Test dynamic request routing

As our hello-world task also included a world-v2 service, let's test per-request routing:

http_proxy=localhost:4140 curl -H 'l5d-dtab: /svc/world => /svc/world-v2' hello
Hello (172.31.20.160) World-V2 (172.31.19.35)!!

By setting the l5d-dtab header, we instructed Linkerd to dynamically route all requests destined for world to world-v2.

linkerd-viz

linkerd-viz collects and displays metrics for all linkerd's running in a cluster. Prior to deploying, let's put some load through our system:

while true; do http_proxy=localhost:4140 curl -s -o /dev/null hello; done

Now deploy a single linkerd-viz instance:

aws ecs run-task --cluster l5d-demo --task-definition linkerd-viz --count 1

# find the ECS node running linkerd-viz
TASK_ID=$(aws ecs list-tasks --cluster l5d-demo --family linkerd-viz --desired-status RUNNING --query taskArns[0] --output text)
CONTAINER_INSTANCE=$(aws ecs describe-tasks --cluster l5d-demo --tasks $TASK_ID --query tasks[0].containerInstanceArn --output text)
INSTANCE_ID=$(aws ecs describe-container-instances --cluster l5d-demo --container-instances $CONTAINER_INSTANCE --query containerInstances[0].ec2InstanceId --output text)
VIZ_NODE=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids $INSTANCE_ID --query Reservations[*].Instances[0].PublicDnsName --output text)

ssh -i "~/.ssh/$KEY_PAIR.pem" -L 127.0.0.1:3000:$VIZ_NODE:3000 ec2-user@$VIZ_NODE -N

# view linkerd-viz (osx)
open http://localhost:3000

Further reading

For more information about configuring Linkerd, see the Linkerd Configuration page.

For more information about linkerd-viz, see the linkerd-viz GitHub repo.