Deploying an application on Kubernetes can require a number of related deployment artifacts or spec files: Deployment, Service, PVCs, ConfigMaps, Service Account — to name just a few. Managing all of these resources and relating them to deployed apps can be challenging, especially when it comes to tracking changes and updates to the deployed application (actual state) and its original source (authorized or desired state).

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is an orchestration service for Docker containers running within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. You can declare the components of a container-based infrastructure, and ECS will deploy, maintain, and remove those components automatically. The resulting ECS cluster lends itself to a microservice architecture where containers are scaled and scheduled based on need.

In Part 1, we introduced a number of key metrics that you can use for ECS monitoring. Monitoring ECS involves paying attention to two levels of abstraction: the status of your services, tasks, and containers, as well as the resource use from the underlying compute and storage infrastructure, monitored per EC2 host or Docker container. In this post, we’ll survey some techniques you can use to monitor both levels of your ECS deployment.

As we explained in Part 1, it’s important to monitor task status and resource use at the level of ECS constructs like clusters and services, while also paying attention to what’s taking place within each host or container. In this post, we’ll show you how Datadog can help you: Automatically collect metrics from every layer of your ECS deployment, Track data from your ECS cluster, plus its hosts and running services in dashboards, and more.

Lambda@Edge is a compute service that allows you to write JavaScript code that executes in any of the 150+ AWS edge locations making up the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) service. In this post, I’ll provide some background on CDN technologies. I will also build out an application stack that serves country-specific content depending on where the user request originates from.

There is a lot to love about Kubernetes. It offers one of the best ways to deploy and run applications on a large pool of resources. With its easy-to-use UI and out-of-the-box capabilities like RBAC, monitoring, auditing, logging, and more, Rancher makes it easy to stand up and manage enterprise grade Kubernetes. Using Rancher, IT Operators can point to their cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) or datacenter and create a cluster with just a few clicks.