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Deploying Zilla Plus on AWS ECS Fargate

Deploying Zilla Plus on AWS ECS Fargate

Available in Zilla Plus

Overview

The Zilla Plus is an enterprise-ready, Kafka-native edge, and service proxy. It is a flexible, secure, and reliable way of creating stateless, multi-protocol API entry points into your Kafka cluster for both native and non-native Kafka clients.

With Zilla Plus, you can create publicly reachable Kafka endpoints into a Kafka cluster. You can also expose topics inside your Kafka cluster via declaratively defined REST, SSE, gRPC, and MQTT APIs.

This Guide will walk you through deploying your first Zilla Plus service on AWS ECS Fargate.

Prerequisites

Subscribe via AWS Marketplace

  • From the active Zilla Plus subscription page

    • Click Continue to Configuration

      • Fulfillment option: Zilla Plus
      • Software version: Select the most recently released version

    • Click Continue to Launch

    • Copy and run the aws login command from the Container images section to confirm access to the Zilla Plus image.

      Note

      Note the image name 709825985650.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/aklivity/zilla-plus-ecr:<version> and one of the version tags stored in the CONTAINER_IMAGES variable, which will be used later.

Create SSM Parameter for Zilla Config

  • Parameter Store console
  • Create parameter
  • Fill out the parameter details.
  • Paste the zilla.yaml configuration to initialize the Zilla Plus service.

Reference:

Name
/zilla/http-echo/zilla.yaml

Create Required IAM Roles

These IAM roles allow ECS tasks to run Zilla Plus and access required AWS resources.

Inline Policy for SSM Parameters

Name
SSMGetParameters

ECS Task Role

Create an IAM role for the Task. This role will be used by the running Zilla Plus container.

Name
ecsTaskRole

ECS Task Execution Role

If you used the Amazon ECR as your image repository, create a role with the AmazonECSTaskExecutionRolePolicy permission and use it as the Task execution role when creating the Task.

Name
ecsTaskExecutionRole

AWS ECS Fargate Task for Zilla Plus

Create the AWS ECS Fargate Task that will be used to deploy Zilla Plus service.

Create Task Definition

  • Go to Amazon Elastic Container Service > Task definitions

  • Create a new Task Definition with JSON from JSON

  • Refer Task Definition JSON tab for reference.

    Task Definition JSON
    {
  "family": "zilla-plus-fargate",
  "networkMode": "awsvpc",
  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "name": "zp-service",
      "image": "709825985650.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/aklivity/zilla-plus-ecr:<version>",
      "portMappings": [
        {
          "name": "http",
          "containerPort": 7114,
          "hostPort": 7114,
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "appProtocol": "http"
        }
      ],
      "essential": true,
      "secrets": [
        {
          "name": "ZILLA_YAML",
          "valueFrom": "arn:aws:ssm:<region>:<aws_account_id>:parameter/<parameter_name>"
        }
      ],
      "entryPoint": [
        "/bin/bash",
        "-c",
        "echo \"$ZILLA_YAML\" > /tmp/zilla.yaml && /opt/zilla/zilla start -v -e -c /tmp/zilla.yaml"
      ],
      "logConfiguration": {
        "logDriver": "awslogs",
        "options": {
          "awslogs-group": "/ecs/",
          "mode": "non-blocking",
          "awslogs-create-group": "true",
          "max-buffer-size": "25m",
          "awslogs-region": "us-east-1",
          "awslogs-stream-prefix": "ecs"
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "requiresCompatibilities": ["FARGATE"],
  "taskRoleArn": "<ecsTaskRole ARN>",
  "executionRoleArn": "<ecsTaskExecutionRole ARN>",
  "cpu": "1 vCPU",
  "memory": "3 GB"
}

  • Replace the following placeholders with your actual values:

    PlaceholderDescription
    <version>The version tag of the Zilla Plus image
    <ecsTaskRole ARN>ARN of the IAM role assigned as the Task Role
    <ecsTaskExecutionRole ARN>ARN of the IAM role assigned as the Execution Role for ECS tasks
    <region>AWS region for SSM Parameters, e.g. us-east-1
    <aws_account_id>AWS account ID for SSM Parameters
    <parameter_name>The name of the Systems Manager Parameter that stores Zilla config.

Create a Service from your AWS ECS Fargate Task

This will create a service based on the configuration in the Task.

  • Create a Service from your new task.
  • Deployment configuration:
    • Family: zilla-plus-fargate
    • Service name: my_zilla_plus_service
  • Network configuration:
    • Set the VPC to be the Same as your ECS Cluster.
    • Select the Public subnets.
    • Ensure the Public IP is enabled in network configuration.

    Open Service Ports

    Make sure the security group allows traffic over the ports defined in the portMappings of the service.

  • Create the Service.

Verify your service is running

Once the service has started with all tasks succeeding, you will see the Zilla Plus container log "started".

Validate the Zilla Plus HTTP Echo Example

This will call the service and get an echoed response.

  • Get the Public IP of the running Task in your service.

  • Call the HTTP Echo service.

    curl -d "Hello, world" -H "Content-Type: text/plain" -X "POST" http://[Task Public IP]:7114

    Expected output:

    Hello, world

  • In your Task logs, you will see a BINDING_HTTP_REQUEST_ACCEPTED log from the above request

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed your first Zilla Plus service using AWS ECS Fargate.

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