Exam Tips

This guide covers essential strategies and best practices to help you succeed in the AWS Developer Associate exam. It begins with fundamental container concepts before exploring key AWS container services and their configurations.

Container Basics

Containers bundle an application with its libraries, dependencies, and configuration files, ensuring that it runs consistently across various environments. Container orchestrators manage these containerized environments by:

• Deploying containers across servers
• Load balancing incoming requests
• Ensuring container-to-container connectivity
• Monitoring container health and performance
• Restarting containers when necessary

AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service)

AWS ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service designed to simplify the deployment and scaling of containerized applications. ECS supports two launch types:

1. EC2 Launch Type: You manage EC2 instances and install the ECS agent to handle container tasks.
2. Fargate Launch Type: AWS handles the compute infrastructure, and billing is based solely on compute usage.

Tasks in ECS are defined using a task definition, a configuration file that specifies container settings, launch parameters, and task behaviors.

ECS Roles

ECS relies on two primary roles:

• Container Instance Role: Assigned to your EC2 instances (or the ECS agent on these instances), this role enables pulling images, launching containers, and transmitting logs and metrics.
• ECS Task Role: Applied to tasks that require access to other AWS services.

Additionally, integrating ECS with Elastic Load Balancers allows direct traffic routing to tasks.

Placement Strategies and Autoscaling

For the EC2 launch type, ECS placement strategies determine how tasks are assigned to container instances. The strategies include:

ECS also supports autoscaling:

• Tasks can autoscale based on CloudWatch metrics.
• ECS instances can be scaled using Auto Scaling Groups and Capacity Providers.
• When deploying new versions, configure both the minimum healthy percent and the maximum healthy percent to maintain service continuity.

AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

EKS is AWS’s managed Kubernetes service, providing an easy way to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters on AWS. With EKS:

• AWS handles the Kubernetes control plane.
• You can choose between Fargate (where AWS manages compute infrastructure) or EC2 (where you manage your own instances) for worker nodes.

AWS ECR (Elastic Container Registry)

AWS ECR is a fully managed container registry that supports both private and public repositories. It offers advanced features such as:

• Image scanning for security vulnerabilities
• Lifecycle policies for automating image cleanup

Summary

This article provides a foundational overview of core container concepts and the AWS container services essential for the AWS Developer Associate exam. Understanding how ECS, EKS, and ECR work, along with their configurations, roles, and scaling options, is key to building robust, scalable, and efficient containerized applications on AWS.

For further reading and detailed guides, check out:

• AWS Documentation
• Kubernetes Basics

Good luck with your exam preparation!