Configuration management
In a microservices architecture, each service interacts with
various resources like databases, queues, and other services. A
consistent way to configure each service's connections and
operating environment is vital. Ideally, an application should
adapt to new configurations without needing a restart. This
approach is part of the Twelve-Factor App principles, which
recommend storing configurations in environment variables.
A different approach is to use
AWS App Config. It’s a feature of AWS Systems Manager which
makes it easy for customers to quickly and safely configure,
validate, and deploy feature flags and application configuration.
Your feature flag and configurations data can be validated
syntactically or semantically in the pre-deployment phase, and can
be monitored and automatically rolled back if an alarm that you
have configured is triggered. AppConfig can be integrated with
Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS by using the AWS AppConfig agent. The
agent functions as a sidecar container running alongside your
Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS container applications. If you use AWS
AppConfig feature flags or other dynamic configuration data in a
Lambda function, then we recommend that you add the AWS AppConfig
Lambda extension as a layer to your Lambda function.
GitOps
is an innovative approach to configuration management that uses
Git as the source of truth for all configuration changes. This
means that any changes made to your configuration files are
automatically tracked, versioned, and audited through Git.
Secrets management
Security is paramount, so credentials should not be passed in
plain text. AWS offers secure services for this, like AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and AWS Secrets Manager. These tools can
send secrets to containers in Amazon EKS as volumes, or to Amazon ECS as environment variables. In AWS Lambda, environment variables
are made available to your code automatically. For Kubernetes
workflows, the
External
Secrets Operator fetches secrets directly from services
like AWS Secrets Manager, creating corresponding Kubernetes
Secrets. This enables a seamless integration with
Kubernetes-native configurations.
