003 - ECS Support

Jan 26th, 2024

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ECS Support

Over the past few months, we have had a growing number of customers ask us about AWS ECS support. Or, more specifically ask us “what if we don’t want to use kubernetes”.

Well, you asked and today we have answered! You can now create Nuon apps that do not rely on Kubernetes!

If you are reading this, you might be asking why? After all, isn’t the promise of Kubernetes that you can “configure once, run anywhere”? - we’re not about to turn our change log into a Kube vs everything else post (that is for another day), but we can share why our customer’s wanted us to build this.

• some teams didn’t have Kube experience and/or want to learn it
• they wanted to optimize cost, reduce complexity and create a faster install experience
• (whether AWS Lambda, ECS Fargate, or something else).
• their customers did not require a shared responsibility model, where they manage part of the k8s cluster.

Nuon apps using ECS offer a simpler way to integrate with existing non-Kubernetes applications, without changing your product architecture.

Creating a Nuon app that uses ECS is as simple as configuring an ECS runner, and selecting an ECS sandbox. You can configure an ECS runner using Terraform:

resource "nuon_app_runner" "main" {
  app_id = nuon_app.main.id

  runner_type = "aws-ecs"

  env_var {
    name = "YOUR_ENV_VAR"
    value = "env-var"
  }
}

While you can always create any sandbox you like, we support both a byo-vpc and turnkey sandbox in our public sandboxes. To use the byo-vpc ecs sandbox, where a customer can provide a vpc id to run your app in, use the following terraform:

resource "nuon_app_sandbox" "main" {
  app_id            = nuon_app.main.id
  terraform_version = "v1.6.3"

  public_repo = {
    repo      = "nuonco/sandboxes"
    branch    = "main"
    directory = "aws-ecs-byovpc"
  }

  var {
    name = "vpc_id"
    interpolation = "{{.nuon.install.inputs.vpc_id}}"
  }
}

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Improved CLI UX

In the past month or so, we have continued to add more debugging capabilities into our CLI. You can now inspect specific components on an install, check sandbox runs, see different logs and more.

Even further, most Nuon users are working with multiple apps (for different BYOC flavors), and managing many installs per app. To make this easier to work with, nuon now supports selecting different resources to work with.

Before, if you wanted to inspect an install you had to pass the install id to each command:

Now, you can select an install, and it will automatically be pinned for any commands:

You can use select or set-current with most resource types, eg: nuon apps select or nuon components set-current.