Has anyone experience with AWS EC2 Container Service?

hosting
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Is anyone running Discourse on AWS’s new EC2 Container Service? Is it recommendable? Are there any known issues with managing them?

Thanks

And a little bit longer… ;oP

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It doesn’t work, because of a couple reasons:

  • (principally) the bootstrapping process, where all your configuration is applied & the database seeded, involves running code in the container, stopping the container, then starting it again with a different pid1
  • backups are broken because the pg_dump binary is mismatched with the server
  • several other odd differences break other stuff, too (can’t remember right now)
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Any update/improvement on this, two years later?

Or will this never ever work at all with EC2 Container Services?

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not sure about container service but I am running discourse under docker along with a side on wordpress(non-dockerised) and not facing issues managing them. as it is being reverse-proxied by nginx to the discourse container.
so everything is organised.

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A container service manages docker and the base OS for you AFAIK. You don’t have root access. You just throw a container in and the service runs it.

Discourse requires root access to config.

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but on EC2 you do have root access.
As OP said discourse doesn’t work on ECS. I wonder why? even when you have root access.

AFAIK, ECS is simply EC2 running docker for you. so, I wonder why it cannot run discourse on ECS. whilst I am running discourse on EC2.

PS: don’t mind If I am wrong. I don’t know much about ECS

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ECS takes away the OS and decker management from you. For example they manage all the upgrades and patches. You dont have to do those. So it is not a complete VM. It is a managed service. You only provide a container.

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This way it’s impossible to run discourse on ECS. since discourse needs to be root

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Can you explain why? Is there any post at meta that’s linked on this topic?

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It will work fine on Ecs , bootstrap an image push to registry and then specify env and volumes

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as sam confirms above, it should work on ecs.

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That’s right. I suppose the container must be prebuilt outside for the exact config then thrown into ECS.

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will try that and possibly write a thorough article for more people to come :slight_smile: Thanks sam

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A lot of config can be provided via env on a bootstrapped image, majority of it

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