How to configure Amazon container service without docker hub integration

Question

I am trying to setup a new springboot+docker(microservices) based project. The deployment is targeted on aws. Every service has a Dockerfile associated with it. I am thinking of using amazon container service for deployment, but as far as I see it only pulls images from docker hub. I don't want ECS to pull from docker-hub, rather build the images from docker file and then take over the deploying those containers.Is it possible to do? If yes how.

Answer 1

This is not possible yet with the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) alone - while ECS meanwhile supports private registries (see also the introductory blog post), it doesn't yet offer an image build service (as usual, AWS is expected to add such notable additional features over time, see e.g. the Feature Request: ECS container dream service for more on this).

However, it can already be achieved with AWS Elastic Beanstalk's built in initial support for Single Container Docker Configurations:

Docker uses a Dockerfile to create a Docker image that contains your source bundle. [...] Dockerfile is a plain text file that contains instructions that Elastic Beanstalk uses to build a customized Docker image on each Amazon EC2 instance in your Elastic Beanstalk environment. Create a Dockerfile when you do not already have an existing image hosted in a repository. [emphasis mine]

In an ironic twist, Elastic Beanstalk has now added Multicontainer Docker Environments based on ECS, but this highly desired more versatile Docker deployment option doesn't offer the ability to build images in turn:

Building custom images during deployment with a Dockerfile is not supported by the multicontainer Docker platform on Elastic Beanstalk. Build your images and deploy them to an online repository before creating an Elastic Beanstalk environment. [emphasis mine]

As mentioned above, I would expect this to be added to ECS in a not too distant future due to AWS' well known agility (see e.g. the most recent ECS updates), but they usually don't commit to roadmap details, so it is hard to estimate how long we need to wait on this one.