AWS ECS and Grafana Loki integration

Hello, my name is Alex, and I’m one of the referrs.me founders! It is a service that helps people in finding job referrals to companies of their dreams or finding someone who can conduct mock interviews prior the real try.

Despite a limited budget and human resources, our team attempted to build a mature and robust DevOps process while developing ReferrsMe. In practice, we’ve already shown that investing in good code, solutions, and IaC pays off in the long run.

This is the first article in a series about ReferrsMe development, and I’d like to focus solely on the ECS and Loki integration process. All subsequent articles will cover topics such as continuous integration, monitoring, and configuration management.

Introduction

ReferrsMe is built on top of AWS ECS. Amazon ECS is a container orchestration service that allows users to easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. The key feature of ECS is that it integrates deeply with the rest of the AWS platform to provide a secure and simple solution for running container workloads.

We chose ECS over EC2 because we did not want to support virtual machines or use Elastic BeanStalk. EKS was also unsuitable for us because we have fewer than 50 containers and it makes no sense to support K8S at this time. Despite the rejection of K8S, we desired a high level of security and flexibility for our workloads, so we chose Fargate ECS engine over EC2.