Earlier, I wrote about zero downtime docker deployment with Tutum. I have recently started experimenting with Amazon ECS (EC2 Container Service), which is Amazon’s offering for the orchestration of Docker containers (and thus a competitor to Tutum). I don’t have a lot of experience with ECS yet, but it looks pretty solid so far.

I found there was a real lack of documentation on how to deploy updated Docker images to Amazon, however, and was forced to do some research in order to figure out how it should be done. Through some diligent experimentation of my own with the AWS ECS CLI and not least some valuable help on the Amazon forums, I was able to come up with a script and requirements for the ECS configuration that together lead to streamlined deployment. As it turns out, you even get zero downtime deployment for free (provided that you use an elastic load balancer, mind)! It’s more magical than in the Tutum case, as ECS by default upgrades one node after the other in the background (hidden by the load balancer) so long as it is allowed to take down at least one node as required.