Gitlab CI Deploy to AWS Fargate

8/7/2019 Richard Murphy

This week we had a presenter back out the day before a scheduled presentation(due to sickness) at a Collab meetup group and I had to scramble the night before to come up with a presentation.  It was too late to ask anyone else, so what to do?  I had been meaning to check out some of the newer container hosting offerings at major cloud providers but had never had the time or reason.  So, now I had a reason, but not much time.  I had to put together a presentation with only a few hours of time invested, and I had to learn a new offering, and then integrate it into a CI/CD pipeline.  I quickly settled on AWS Fargate as it seemed there were a few blog posts already from folks who had done something similar and I wouldn’t have to figure it all out from scratch.  I chose a Gitlab CI/CD pipeline that we had put together in another demo for deployments to Openshift, it would be easy to modify it and add another deployment stage.  The real challenge was- could I get a Fargate cluster setup and working AND integrated deploys working in a CI/CD pipeline in only a few hours?  Thankfully, AWS had created a simple wizard to ease the creation of the cluster and it only took 2 tries to get it working!  Fargate is a powerful offering that makes container hosting similar to serverless function hosting- no management (the Angels sing…)  Below you can see a video of the steps I went through to put the demo together.