From dd847ef84929c5c74c7fd45f63af46e0d79897d2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: shockrah Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:25:48 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] New post about fargate stuff --- content/media/img/fargate/first.png | 3 + .../hosting-static-sites-with-fargate.md | 115 ++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 118 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/media/img/fargate/first.png create mode 100644 content/posts/hosting-static-sites-with-fargate.md diff --git a/content/media/img/fargate/first.png b/content/media/img/fargate/first.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cb27901 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/media/img/fargate/first.png @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:7b9b83a09a2b5fc4ab4d9f84462b0dfbad9e68a7329b4f056ff58daf24229060 +size 37408 diff --git a/content/posts/hosting-static-sites-with-fargate.md b/content/posts/hosting-static-sites-with-fargate.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af0d338 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/hosting-static-sites-with-fargate.md @@ -0,0 +1,115 @@ +--- +title: Hosting websites with Fargate ECS +date: 2023-03-27 +draft: false +description: What I learned from using Fargate and ECS to host websites +category: article +image: /media/img/fargate/first.jpg +--- + +# Context - How my Websites have been Hosted in the Past + +A very straight forward setup that lent itself well so keeping costs low and +which may inspire you to also use a similar setup should you want to host +your own website with a Fargate cluster: + +## Infrastructure Maintained with Terraform + +* Single EC2 machine +* A security group for SSH and web ingress, as well as HTTPS egress +* Elastic IP attached +* `A record`'s in route53 pointing to the Elastic IP + +## Software Required for this Setup + +* Nginx as a reverse proxy which pointed to all the HTML/CSS/JS required for each website + +The config for this was usually hand written then deployed with Ansible. +Configuration for TLS was then deployed afterwards with Ansible as well. +Worked well enough and it meant I had a decent solution to TLS cert renewals. + +* Gitlab pipelines for deploying static files + +Since this required SSH access a service user was created and would usually +setup SSH in Gitlab with the pipeline script below: + +```yml + before_script: + - eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" + - echo "${CI_USER_KEY}" | tr -d '\r' | ssh-add - + - mkdir -p ~/.ssh/ + - chmod 700 ~/.ssh/ + - ssh-keyscan shockrah.xyz 2>&1 >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts + - chmod 644 ~/.ssh/known_hosts +``` + +# Technical Side of the Current Setup + +* 1 Fargate Cluster containing 1 service for each website + +Technically the same could be achieved with 1 service for all websites but that +will come in the next post. + +* 1 Load balancer for all websites + +Basically just abusing the load balancer rules to direct traffic to the correct +service target group in the desired cluster. + +* ACM managed certificates + +Super easy renewal of certificates, be it through Terraform or manually. + +## Software/Docker Images used for Services + +* [nginx-s3-gateway](https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-s3-gateway) + +This image allows the usage of nginx to proxy **private** S3 buckets. +This is basically how I am able to keep my S3 buckets totally locked down +while still allowing the content to be cleanly viewable to the public. + + +# Why the switch to the new setup + +1. Easier to manage tooling + +Being that [Project Athens](https://gitlab.com/shockrah/project-athens/) is not +my only project that requires attention in regards to infrastructure and upkeep +so reducing the amount of tooling and documentation _required_ to manage +things is worth it for me personally. + +2. Updating content is much easier + +The biggest benefit is that I have to maintain less code to deploy content to +the websites themselves meaning less code per project's pipeline. +In many cases this also means I can remove Ansible entirely from a project which +means much less to manage in terms of keys and pipeline code. + + +# Plans for Future Technical Changes + +1. Making the buckets public to leverage a reguar Nginx container + +The advantage of this is that I can use 1 container to balance all my websites +just like before and still let the ACM + application load balancer do the +heavy lifting for TLS. +With some clever auto-scaling I can then reduce the average amount of containers +I pay for while still retaining good availability to the sites themselves. + + +# Cost + +The old setup was definitely way cheaper. +The load balancer alone runs me about 25-40$ USD + the two containers +that I use for each site. Overall cost is slightly higher than just the single +EC2 machine however you can minimize this cost by just running less containers. + +Reason for the whack estimation is because I have't looked too hard into how +much this costs exactly as I have other clusters that I manage at the moment +and things get lost in the noise. + +Just know that if you're looking to minimize price at all costs then EC2 machines + autoscaling is the way to go. +Fargate _does_ however make things much easier to deploy/manage. + + + +