---
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.png
---

# 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.