Book Review: "Docker on AWS", by Justin Menga

I encountered some difficulties with creating and deploying the MVP for the app I wanted to build, mostly coming from the deployment side of things, and I wanted to learn what was possible for Docker on AWS before I prematurely optimized for any one system design. This book proved to me that I only had a surface-level understanding of AWS, and helped take my skills to the next level.

Some of the things I’ve learned were:

• CloudFormation is king in AWS-land. This book gave me my first serious look at CloudFormation, and I’ve got to say I’ve really enjoyed learning infrastructure-as-code. It’s so nice to be able to declaratively define stateful resources and get the same results time after time. CloudFormation is also nice because it ties very well with AWS’s native tooling, and you can find all kinds of CloudFormation tutorials online. It’s actually not that hard to learn.

  If you’re interested in DevOps, definitely learn a platform like Terraform or CloudFormation, it’ll improve your life quite a bit.

• Security is a whole ball game. really appreciate how Justin defines highly granular AWS IAM roles for pretty much every resource. It gives me confidence that this custom ECS stack can remain secure in production environments. What I didn’t expect was how much security definitions tie into CloudFormation resource declaration.

  I chose CloudFormation over Terraform partially because I guessed AWS Support would be more familiar with CloudFormation issues, and because I figured CloudFormation would expose the “bare-metal” guts of AWS better than something that required non-native connectors, but now I’m also glad I chose CloudFormation because it’s easy to orchestrate resources securely.

  I can see how DevOps is on the frontlines of securing stacks, not just in the IAM sphere, but also in adding resources. Things like adding a reverse proxy and NAT traversal are core to ensuring security best practices, and things I need to learn to do better.

• ECS provides a great balance between resource transparency and resource automation. I didn’t like Elastic Beanstalk as much as I enjoyed learning about Elastic Container Service, because with ECS you get the actual underlying EC2 system logs. You can also define resources at different layers in order to maximize resource utilization; Justin even has a section on understanding ECS autoscaling. However, you can also define rolling deloyments, and CI/CD pipelines on top of that / those EC2 instances, so once your infrastructure is how you like it, you don’t really need to touch it anymore. You get the agency to move in the direction you want.

  I think one thing that might be tricky is EC2 autoscaling along with ECS autoscaling, but that’s a bridge I’ll personally cross later. I really like the idea of having just one EC2 instance that has everything, it moves in the direction of a unified binary.

Some things I didn’t like about the book were:

• The attachment to AWS Lambda for defining custom CloudFormation resources. I’m sure it scales a lot better, and Lambda is really nice when it works with CloudWatch, but there’s no analogue for Lambda locally (maybe Firecracker as a functions-as-a-service platform), and Lambda is…I’ve found Lambda difficult to work with.

  Whether that’s because CloudFormation stacks, when deployed without prior creation, automatically roll back upon failure deleting the associated CloudWatch logs, or because you have no visibility into the Lambda runtime (besides python3.7 or what-not), or because Lambda resources in the book are defined inline vs. a separate Python file that might indicate issues locally before remote deployment, or because Lambda methods issue SIGINT upon Python warnings, or because I’m just not that good at Lambda at the moment, I’m not sure. I do prefer servers, and I think this book outlined the tradeoffs more specifically but didn’t change the game in that regards.

  I don’t think this is a deal breaker, though. I wonder whether you could deploy an ECS task definition in order to execute a database migration, vs. a Lambda custom resource. A task definition could wrap a short-lived Docker container instance, or even a Docker stage if possible, which would mimic Docker Compose more closely.

• The CloudFormation stacks become ever more unwieldy to manage the larger they grow. I get that production-grade CloudFormation stacks are much more complicated than the ones described in this book, but I’m also guessing they have much more extensive validation and custom support within companies. Not only can you define CI/CD pipelines using CloudFormation, you can deploy a CI/CD pipeline to validate CloudFormation templates. That kind of customization is out of scope for a book, but I think it may affect the reader’s understanding and appreciation of CloudFormation.

  For example, I had immense difficulty with the AWS Secrets Manager, likely because at time of writing, AWS::SecretsManager::Secret wasn’t a defined resource within CloudFormation, and secrets may have had to be pre-created and tied into CloudFormation via AWS Lambda. This change threw me off, and I encountered significant CloudFormation stabilization issues, where the only error I would get is a timeout after an hour.

  Typing into the above, I also had latency issues with deploying resources that would stabilize after different periods of time. For example, EC2 instances are easy to create, while RDS instances are much more expensive. I didn’t know how to recover from ROLLBACK_COMPLETE states, so I ended up deleting the entire CloudFormation stack. This made my iteration cycles quite long.

  In a later update, I might like to see nested or separate CloudFormation templates with common configuration files, in order to separate deployments of resources by deployment time, and to continue practicing examples even if all resources can’t be stood up for some reason.

Overall, this book is great, and I’ll definitely keep referring to it as I build out my app. I would say it’s the best DevOps book I’ve read, but I haven’t read too many DevOps books, and so I would say that doesn’t mean much. It does make DevOps approachable and demonstrable to software engineers from other backgrounds, and I think that might just be higher praise.