Trisul's Blog

Building robust CI/CD pipelines that automatically deploy containerized applications to AWS ECS requires careful orchestration of GitLab Runner, Docker image building, security scanning, and deployment strategies. This tutorial covers everything from pipeline configuration to blue-green deployments with rollback capabilities.

Pipeline Architecture Overview

• Source: GitLab repository with application code
• Build: Docker image creation and testing
• Security: Container image vulnerability scanning
• Deploy: AWS ECS service deployment with rolling updates

Step 1: Set Up GitLab Runner on AWS

# Launch EC2 instance for GitLab Runner
aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 --count 1 --instance-type t3.medium --key-name my-key --security-group-ids sg-12345678 --subnet-id subnet-12345678

# Install GitLab Runner
curl -L "https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/runner/gitlab-runner/script.deb.sh" | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install gitlab-runner

# Register runner with GitLab
sudo gitlab-runner register \
  --url "https://gitlab.com/" \
  --registration-token "YOUR_REGISTRATION_TOKEN" \
  --executor "docker" \
  --docker-image "alpine