News

AWS and Docker Collaborate on Streamlined Container Workflow

• By John K. Waters
• 07/20/2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined with Docker to create "an integrated and frictionless experience" that allows developers to switch from running containers in a local Docker Desktop environment to Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) quickly and easily.

The two companies made the announcement at the recent AWS Cloud Container Conference.

Developers can now use Docker Compose, Docker Desktop and Docker Hub to deploy applications on Amazon ECS and the AWS Fargate serverless compute engine. This new functionality streamlines the process of deploying and managing containers in AWS from a local development environment running Docker.

Previously, taking a local Docker Compose file and running it on Amazon ECS posed a challenge because of constructs in Amazon ECS that were not part of the Docker Compose specification, the company explained in a statement, but were necessary for the application to run in AWS. Docker and AWS collaborated to build a simplified workflow that allows developers to quickly and easily switch from running containers in a local Docker Desktop environment to Amazon ECS. This provides developers an easy path to running highly secure and scalable production applications in Amazon ECS, the companies said.

"This is a big step toward giving developers the best experience building, sharing, and running cloud-native apps with Docker and Amazon ECS," said Docker CEO Scott Johnston in a statement. "This experience allows developers to work locally and take the same experience into a production-scale cloud service with Amazon ECS, reducing the span of knowledge needed and accelerating their time to production."

Developers will now be able to use the Docker CLI and Docker Compose to start locally and run their multi-container apps straight through to deployment from Docker Hub to Amazon ECS.

"This accelerated path to modern application development and deployment allows customers to focus more effort on the unique value of their applications, and less time on figuring out how to deploy to the cloud," said Deepak Singh, VP of the Compute Services group at AWS, in a statement.

This "accelerated path" will allow developers to leverage the knowledge they already have about Docker and the apps they have defined with Docker Compose to accelerate their ability to deploy in the cloud. This was the core challenge Docker has addressed with the new workflow. But there's also the advantage of native integration between Docker and Amazon ECS, which allows customers to more smoothly target the Amazon service for their multi-container deployments. And Docker Compose, which is a popular developer tool for defining multi-container applications, is an open source specification with open governance -- which means the wider community of new and existing users will have a level of transparency that will allow them input on the future direction of the specification, as well as Docker Compose-based tools.

"With a large number of containers being built using Docker, we're very excited to work with Docker to simplify the developer's experience of building and deploying containerized applications to AWS," Singh said. "Now customers can easily deploy their containerized applications from their local Docker environment straight to Amazon ECS."