AWS ECS Deployment: Overview

Kion is a collection of microservices that run in a cluster on AWS. The deployment of the software is performed via two AWS CloudFormation templates: one that sets up the database and one that sets up the application.

The application architecture includes:

• An ECS cluster.
• A collection of ECS services supporting application microservices.
• An Amazon Aurora database for data storage.
• A user-facing load balancer that exposes the UI and API.
• An internal application load balancer to communicate across application instances.

The installation process includes:

1. Creating a VPC with subnets across 2 or more availability zones.
2. Launching the AWS CloudFormation template to create the database.
3. Launching the AWS CloudFormation template to set up the application.

Where to Install

Kion can be installed in the following AWS environments:

• AWS Commercial
• AWS GovCloud
• AWS SC2S

We recommend installing Kion in a separate, dedicated AWS account, since the Kion service-account role in that AWS account will have permissions to access all of your managed AWS accounts. The Kion service-account role will have the AdministratorAccess IAM policy attached. You can choose to limit this access, but it will impact how effectively Kion can manage accounts.

Note: We recommend installing Kion in a separate, dedicated AWS account. We do not recommend installing into the management account.

Billable Services

Once you install Kion, you will see billing charges for the following services on the account.

• Amazon Elastic Container Service
• Elastic Load Balancing
• AWS Data Transfer
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
• Amazon Aurora Storage
• Amazon Aurora IO
• Amazon Aurora MySQL
• Simple Storage Service (S3)

These are optional services that may accrue costs. They must be configured before they will be used.

• CloudWatch Logs
• Amazon VPC Interface Endpoints
• Certificate Manager (ACM)
• NAT Gateway

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