Recently I spent almost two days trying to run Elasticsearch in a docker container and hosted under a Elastic Container Service. A word of caution, running a IO-Heavy app like ES under a container like docker might not be a good idea. Specially if you can’t use Native Networking and have to deal with abstracted bridge mode (Currently you can only run in Bridged mode in Elastic Container Service). However, our purpose is to provide search capability on a small set of data (less than 500K) and we were not concerned about the IO overhead, the maintenance benefit outruns the performance penalty so its a good fit for our requirement. Also, if you want to use these scripts for large volume of data , you will have to map larger disk space on the Host services (which is not done here).

While I am not going to describe step-by-step of what ECS is and what Docker is (There is plenty of material from Amazon on the topic), I’ll focus on sharing the code and project that has a working Elastic Image for Docker. Also, I had to re-build a docker image for Elasticsearch of my own because the default docker image that comes from Elasticsearch runs on open-jdk and I wanted Oracle SDK.

Without further Ado , Here is the git-hub project for the elasticsearch:

https://github.com/sajid2045/elasticsearch

And the Elasticsearch-ECS container (with some basic plugin and elastic-ec2 plugin installed):

https://github.com/sajid2045/elasticsearch-ecs

I have setup a build on docker-hub so feel free to use it directly from there:

https://hub.docker.com/r/sajid2045/elasticsearch/

And

https://hub.docker.com/r/sajid2045/elasticsearch-ecs/

Now, a note of credit , most of the work is copied from this blog post:

http://blog.dmcquay.com/devops/2015/09/12/running-elasticsearch-on-aws-ecs.html

However, I have faced some issues mostly because I am trying to run Elastic 2.2 version. But you must read through this blog to understand the internal working principle of this blog post and because its so nicely detailed there, I am not going to repeat them here.

Cloud Formation:
I have used a custom cloud formation script to make sure my instances ends up in the special VPC structure specific to my organization, you can use the default Elastic ECS Cloud template if you just want to try out the feature.

Feel free to look at it if you have similar requirement: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sajid2045/elasticsearch-ecs/master/cloud-formation-template.json

With the Ready Docker Images and the recipe of how to use them, I think you should have a much smoother time setting it up , Best of luck 🙂