Advanced Docker Compose concepts on ECS

We have managed to deploy our Compose application to a dedicated VPC and a dedicated ECS cluster. This gives us more control over our application and the resources we use. Building a cloud-native application comes with various benefits. We can have a rolling application update without any downtime, we can tune and scale an application based on its requirements, and we can manage and share secrets efficiently.

Updating the application

The docker compose up command is sufficient to update the application. Hence, the same command that is used to spin up the services will be used to update them.

Since Compose is backed by CloudFormation, the update will take place, but it can also cause downtime if a certain component of the infrastructure is removed and recreated. Rolling updates need to be configured. By using a rolling update, the container instances of a service are updated incrementally. This ensures that the application can still service...