Deploy containerized applications seamlessly across AWS and your data centers. Amazon ECS Anywhere enables you to use the same management tools and APIs for both cloud and on-premises workloads, eliminating the need for separate container orchestration systems.
Overview
This Guidance demonstrates how to build a robust hybrid architecture using Amazon ECS Anywhere with cross-region load balancing, enabling seamless container orchestration across cloud and on-premises environments. It helps organizations achieve high availability and disaster recovery through intelligent workload distribution while meeting strict compliance, data locality, and latency requirements. The solution shows enterprises how to leverage existing infrastructure investments while gaining the benefits of AWS managed services, enabling minimal-downtime deployments and automated failover capabilities. Perfect for industries like financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, this architecture provides a blueprint for maintaining consistent container management across distributed environments while ensuring business continuity and regulatory compliance.
Benefits
Extend cloud capabilities on-premises
Simplify disaster recovery
Implement zero-downtime deployments with multi-region architecture spanning AWS and on-premises environments. Running identical containerized workloads across locations provides instant failover capabilities during regional outages or maintenance windows.
Optimize infrastructure costs
Leverage existing on-premises investments while gaining cloud management benefits. This hybrid approach allows you to run workloads where they make the most sense economically while maintaining consistent container deployment and management practices across environments.
How it works
These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.
Step 1
The Infrastructure Team deploys AWS Region 1 with VPC1 for cloud workloads and configures on-premises network segments for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Anywhere nodes, preparing servers for hybrid disaster recovery.
Step 2
DevOps Team creates an Amazon ECS cluster in AWS, generates Amazon ECS Anywhere activation keys via the AWS Console, configures IAM roles, and establishes secure HTTPS connectivity (port 443) from on-premises to AWS service endpoints for Amazon ECS, AWS Systems Manager (AWS SSM), and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR).
Step 3
System Administrators provision on-premises servers (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM minimum), install Docker or Containerd runtime, execute Amazon ECS Anywhere installation script to deploy AWS SSM or Amazon ECS agents, and register nodes using activation credentials through the corporate firewall.
Step 4
The Network Team implements AWS Direct Connect, configures firewall rules for outbound HTTPS traffic to AWS endpoints, enabling secure Amazon ECS Anywhere agent communication with AWS control plane without internet exposure.
Step 5
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming requests across healthy containers using target group health checks, routing traffic to both on-premises Amazon ECS Anywhere instances and AWS Fargate tasks based on configured load balancing algorithms.
Step 6
An Amazon ECS Anywhere multi-region architecture helps customers to achieve zero-downtime deployments and instant disaster recovery by running the same containerized workloads seamlessly across on-premises data centers, eliminating the risk of complete application failure during regional outages or data center maintenance.
Deploy with confidence
Everything you need to launch this Guidance in your account is right here.
Let's make it happen
Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs.