Deploying a Faktory worker to AWS Fargate

Looking for a fresh, 2018 approach to deploying a Rails app to AWS? We've partnered with DailyDrip on a series of videos to guide you through the process. We're covering how to Dockerize a Rails app, AWS Fargate, logging, monitoring, setting up load balancing, SSL, CDN, and more.

In the previous post of this series, we deployed the Faktory service to AWS Fargate and created our first background job. Today we'll setup a Ruby worker service to pull jobs from the Faktory server and execute them.

Setting Up Our Worker Service

We need to set up a new task definition for our worker service, but it will use the same image our Rails app (the produciton demo app) is using.

Let's start by pushing up our new image.

➜ docker build -t production .
➜ docker tag production:latest 154477107666.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dailydrip/produciton
➜ docker push 154477107666.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dailydrip/produciton:latest

Now, let's create our new task definition. Since we're using the same underlying image and we'll need to set up the same environment variables, it'll be easier to create our new task definition based off of the existing web task definition we created a few videos back.

Before we do that, we need to set up a couple of new environment variables on our existing web task definition.

For that, we need to select the latest version of our Web task definition and click Create new revision.

Once we're in the configuration page, we need to scroll down and select our produciton container. Scroll down a bit and add these environment variables:

Once we've added that, we can save the new revision of our web task definition.

Now, we can move on to creating our new task definition for our worker service. Let's start by selecting the latest revision of our web app task definition and clicking Create new revision.

From here, we need to change two things. First, we need to change the name of our task definition to worker, then we need to scroll down to our produciton container and click on it.

Once we are in the model for our container settings, we need to set the command to bundle,exec,faktory-worker. After that, we can scroll to the bottom and click Update. Then, after the modal screen disappears we can scroll to the bottom and click Create.

We should now have a new task definition named worker, and we can move on to creating our new service for the worker.

Creating the Service

Now that we have our task definition set up, let's create our worker service. To do that, we need to navigate over to our Clusters dashboard and click Create.

We're going to choose these options (leaving the rest as their defaults) to create our service:

Then, click Next step.

For our network settings, we're going to choose:

Then, click Next Step.

For our Auto Scaling, we'll leave it at the default and click Next Step.

Lastly, look over the configuration and make sure everything is correct and click Create Service.

After we've created our service, we can click the View Service link to go to the dashboard for our service. After a minute or so, we'll probably see that the service fails to start. This is because we haven't given our worker service access to the Faktory service.

We can follow the same steps above that we used to provide access to our Rails app. Once we've edited the rules, it should look similar to this.

inbound rules - add worker access

Now, we can restart our new service.

➜ aws ecs update-service --service worker --cluster Produciton --force-new-deployment

After a moment, we can navigate back to our AWS console and see that our worker service is now running.

We can verify that we've successfully connected to the Faktory service by visiting the page and looking at the number of connections.

Faktory dashboard - connected

We can also go into our Rails app, try to share a checklist, and verify that the action triggers a new background job.

Faktory success

Oops! It looks like we forgot to give our worker service access to our database.

Let's correct that and try again.

Faktory success

As you can see, there were a few failure attempts while I was making the changes. This was caused by me creating a few additional background jobs, which retried before I could update the settings.

But now, we're finally able to run background jobs! Yay!

What's left to the reader?

Today we cloned our existing web app tasks definition to create our worker task definition and set up a worker service.

However, with all that we've done, there are still a few more improvements that could be made for real production usage.

First, does it actually make sense to run Faktory as a service using ECS?

I hope you've enjoyed learning some of the basics of setting up Faktory and encourage you to take a look at the Faktory documentation.

Resources

Our full series on deploying to AWS