Consul Service Mesh on Amazon ECS Now Generally Available

We are pleased to announce the general availability of HashiCorp Consul service mesh on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Amazon ECS users can now run Consul service mesh in their production environments.

In September, we announced the Consul on ECS public beta. The beta release enabled users to deploy Consul in a secure configuration on Amazon ECS. Since the beta release, the team has focused on making Consul on ECS production-ready through improvements to health checking, zero-downtime startup and shutdown, and more, including:

• ECS health check syncing: Consul on ECS now supports syncing ECS task health checks to Consul. This feature ensures the state of your services is always mirrored between Consul and ECS.
• Consul-native health checks: Consul on ECS now enables you to specify Consul-native health checks. Consul’s health checks can be layered on top of ECS checks to ensure that your service is not only running but that it is also ready to receive traffic. This capability provides increased health granularity, similar to Kubernetes readiness probes.
• Zero-downtime startup and shutdown: The GA release of Consul on ECS finely orchestrates the startup and shutdown of sidecar containers to ensure that traffic is routed to applications only when they’re ready to receive it, and that traffic is immediately routed away from tasks that are shutting down.
• Terraform modules: The consul-ecs Terraform modules have been updated to support deploying Consul with the latest capabilities and now also support specifying Consul service tags and metadata.
• Support for the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP): The GA release enables HCP customers to connect to their production ECS workloads.

We are also excited to announce that HashiCorp and AWS have been collaborating on an AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) deployment of Consul on ECS. The CDK construct allows CDK users to deploy Consul and makes it easy to add existing ECS tasks into the service mesh.

»Try Consul on ECS Now

The following HashiCorp Learn tutorials are available to help you get started with Consul on ECS:

• Serverless Consul service mesh with ECS and HCP (and this companion demo video on Deploying HCP Consul on Amazon ECS offers an easy walkthrough of this HashiCorp Learn guide)
• Service mesh with ECS and Consul on EC2

Both tutorials provide guidance on how to deploy a new Consul environment on ECS, or how to integrate an existing Consul cluster with ECS.

»Learn More

To learn more, please visit our documentation, which includes step-by-step instructions for moving existing applications to the service mesh along with detailed architectural information.

The HashiConf Global talk on Adopting Consul on ECS by Jez Halford, Head of Cloud Engineering at Tide, is also a great resource for learning about a real-world deployment of Consul on ECS.

And be sure to watch the AWS-hosted Containers from the Couch talk on deploying Consul as service mesh on Amazon ECS. And check it out later on demand.