Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Introduction

Multicast, a widely utilized IP-based communication method, finds applications across various sectors such as finance, media, telecommunications, and transportation. This article outlines how to activate multicast in container environments managed by Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). While Amazon ECS is a fully managed service, additional steps are necessary to facilitate multicast within an ECS deployment. By integrating multicast with ECS, organizations can adopt modern containerized application development methodologies while leveraging reliable multicast networking technology for application discovery and data distribution.

The foundational element of this solution is the AWS Transit Gateway. This service inherently supports multicast and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), enabling one-to-many communication within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For those new to this topic, it might be beneficial to check out foundational resources on multicast service discovery in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This article builds upon the multicast capabilities of EC2 while addressing container-specific configuration needs.

Solution Overview

ECS simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. It can utilize AWS Fargate or EC2 technologies for compute resources; however, as of now, only EC2 Linux deployment mode supports multicast.

The architecture consists of Transit Gateway, an ECS cluster with EC2 worker nodes, and containers deployed with awsvpc networking support.

Requirements

To enable multicast in container environments orchestrated by ECS, the following components are necessary:

A VPC with both public and private subnets across two Availability Zones
An Internet Gateway and NAT gateways
A Transit Gateway with VPC attachments
A Multicast Domain with subnet associations
An ECS Cluster
EC2-based container instances configured for IGMP version 2
Container images capable of multicast communication

Deployment Walkthrough

You can launch an AWS CloudFormation stack to build the solution, which will create the required resources mentioned above.

This stack will generate the following AWS resources:

A VPC with public subnets distributed across two Availability Zones
A CloudWatch group secured by an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Managed Key for VPC flow logs
An Internet Gateway with a default route in the public subnets
A Transit Gateway along with VPC attachments
A Multicast Domain with subnet associations
A resilient ECS cluster configured with an AutoScaling Group, consisting of two ECS container instances across two Availability Zones. These EC2-based container instances are set up to support IGMP version 2, which aligns with the Transit Gateway’s IGMP capabilities.

Once the VPC, Transit Gateway, and ECS deployments are finalized, you can operate your multicast-enabled containers. For additional learning, you can attend this webinar on selling yourself in job interviews, which can further enhance your preparation skills.

Cloning the GitHub Repository

The AWS CloudFormation templates and Dockerfile examples for this guide can be accessed here. To get started, clone the repository using the command:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-ecs-multicast-sample

This will generate a new folder named amazon-ecs-multicast-sample containing the necessary files.

Launching the CloudFormation Stack

To deploy the stack:

Log in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the CloudFormation console.
Select an AWS Region that supports multicast with IGMP—check the AWS Transit Gateway FAQ for the latest region updates.
Click on Create Stack. In the Specify Template pane, select Upload a template file and upload the 1_multicast_ecs_vpc.yaml file from your cloned repository.
In the next step, provide stack details, assign a name to the stack, and enter a CIDR block for the VPC along with Subnet CIDR ranges.
No inputs are necessary on the Configure stack options page, so proceed to the Review page. Here, you must acknowledge the creation of IAM resources by checking the appropriate box before clicking Create stack.

The resource creation process will commence and typically takes about 5–10 minutes. Once the stack status reaches CREATE_COMPLETE, you can proceed to the next section. Make sure to copy the ECS Cluster ID, VPC ID, and Subnets to a notepad for future reference.

Deploying Multicast-Enabled Workloads

At this stage, you have a fully operational VPC, Transit Gateway with Multicast domain, and an ECS cluster featuring two worker nodes. If you already possess multicast-enabled container images, you can deploy them now.

For demonstration purposes, you can create a multicast sender and receiver using the following Dockerfile instructions and push the images to a registry. You may utilize Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) or any other container registry. For guidance on pushing a Docker image to Amazon ECR, refer to this documentation page.

Dockerfile for Multicast Receiver Container:

FROM ubuntu
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y tcpdump
RUN apt-get install -y iperf
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/iperf", "-s", "-u", "-B", "233.252.0.5", "-i", "1"]

Dockerfile for Multicast Sender Container:

FROM ubuntu
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y tcpdump
RUN apt-get install -y iperf
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/iperf", "-c", "233.252.0.5", "-u", "-b", "10k", "-t", "86400"]

The receiver container subscribes to the multicast group 233.252.0.5, accepting traffic directed towards this group. Conversely, the sender container transmits UDP traffic at a rate of 10 Kb/sec to the same group for a duration of one day (86,400 seconds). For more information regarding iperf configuration flags, consult iperf’s documentation here.

Following the construction of containers and their respective uploads to a container registry, you can then utilize a second CloudFormation stack to create the following AWS resources:

A security group permitting UDP and IGMP traffic
Multicast receiver and sender ECS tasks

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