Lab Guide: Using Amazon ECS for Blue-Green Deployments

Welcome to Cloud Academy's Lab Guide for our Hands-on Lab Using Amazon ECS for Blue-Green Deployments.

Deploying and maintaining different environments in AWS is a key skill aquire in you cloud computing career. Best practices state you need a staging enviornment and a production enviornment. That way you can test changes in staging before they go live in production for your customers. 

In this lab, we walk you through this process.

However, due to the security restrictions we place on this particular lab, you need to be extremely careful on which settings you configure, or else your app won't deploy.

Students' most common error is when they forget that the checkbox for Allow AWS CodeBuild to modify this service role needs to be UNCHECKED. You can see this in my configuration below:

Project configuration:

Project name: Enter ecslab-blue-project

Source:

Source provider: Select Amazon S3

Bucket: Select bucket starting with cloudacademylabs-caecslab-

S3 object key: Enter ecslabblue.zip

Environment:

Environment image: Ensure Managed image is selected

Operating system: Select Ubuntu

Runtime: Select Standard

Image: Select aws/codebuild/standard:4.0

Image version: Select Always use the latest image for this runtime version

Privileged: Checked

Service role: Select Existing service role

Role ARN: Select the CodeBuildServiceRole role

Allow AWS CodeBuild to modify this service role...: UNCHECKED

Buildspec:

Build specifications: Ensure Use a buildspec file is selected

Buildspec name: Enter buildspec.yml

Artifacts:

Type: Ensure No artifacts is selected

You should be able to build the blue project successfully.

 It's important to note that this needs to be unchecked more than once! Later in lab, you'll be instructed to go back to edit the environment. After clicking Edit...

 1) Uncheck Allows AWS CodeBuild to modify this service role... again

 2)  Expand Additional configuration, scroll down to Environment variables, and enter the following:

Name: AWS_ACCOUNT_ID

Value: 996526086145 (the student AWS Account ID, this will vary every session, sample ID for my session)

Type: Ensure Plaintext is selected

 3) Click update environment.

 4) Click Start build, and this should let you build the project:

Knowing this, you should be able to complete the lab.

If you have any additional questions or concerns, please email support@cloudacademy.com 

Happy Training!