Show HN: Deploy highly available infra to EC2 with Docker-compose and CDK

4 points

2 years ago

I created a CDK deploy that uses docker-rollout [1][2] to deploy highly available infrastructure to EC2 using only autoscaling groups. It is not super polished but it is a complete example, so it could be useful if you are considering hosting on EC2. Rolling out deploys involves updating one file on S3 and running one script.

Ironically after all that setup, I decided to give Linode with k8s a try [3] :-) (due to aws' high costs of egress and NAT gws / IPv4 tax on AWS, and the fact that some apps that I want to run are easier to deploy with helm).

More notes:

* I did try ECS and Fargate, which are nice, but also come with associated costs and a bunch of complexity. At that point, I rather spend time directly with k8s, which should make my localhost parity way higher, and hosting somewhere more affordable.

* I tried both Pulumi and Terraform. I have mixed feelings about them. I ended up using CDK because it _felt_ like the nicer development experience (except when CloudFormation fails and it kind of hides the reason why, sigh ... fishing for logs on CloudWatch is such a drag!).

* I tried to add some NACL rules since I ended up running the thing on a public VPC. I couldn't make it work but at that time I had already decided to host elsewhere so I left it like that :-). I did succeed on adding support for AWS WAF. Sadly, the cdk currently doesn't have high level support for WAF so it was not as nice to setup.

1: https://github.com/Wowu/docker-rollout

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34690947

3: https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-m...