Consul on Amazon ECS 0.3 Adds Extended Configuration

We are pleased to announce that HashiCorp Consul on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) 0.3 is now generally available for all users. This release extends configuration support and enables secure multi-datacenter service mesh support for Amazon ECS users.

In November of 2021, we announced the first general availability release for Consul on ECS. The GA release focused on a production-ready, single Consul datacenter on ECS. Since then, the Consul team has focused on supporting additional configurations to enable more deployment scenarios on ECS, including:

• Extended configuration: Consul on ECS now supports passing additional configuration options for Consul service registration and for the Consul agent, so that you can tailor your ECS services to your use case.
• Cross-datacenter upstreams: Consul on ECS now supports configuring upstream services residing in other Consul datacenters. Your ECS services can talk to applications running in any Consul datacenter, whether on ECS, Kubernetes, or other platforms.
• Deploy without Terraform: Terraform remains a first-class citizen for deploying to ECS, but with extended configuration and new documentation, Consul on ECS can now be configured without Terraform for those organizations with heterogeneous deployment tooling.
• Large clusters: The team has completed initial performance testing of worst-case scenarios to validate the Consul on ECS architecture. The access control list (ACL) controller is now more efficient and the team has proven Consul on ECS can safely churn thousands of tasks at a time.

»Try Consul on ECS Now

A pair of HashiCorp Learn tutorials are available to help you get started with Consul on ECS:

• Serverless Consul Service Mesh with ECS and HCP
• Service Mesh with ECS and Consul on EC2

To learn more, please see HashiCorp Consul’s AWS ECS 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 for a demo walkthrough deploying Consul as service mesh on Amazon ECS, check out the AWS-hosted Containers from the Couch talk.