NestJS Application Deployment Overview

Deploying a NestJS application involves taking the code developed locally and making it accessible to users on a server. This process ensures that the application runs efficiently and securely and that it scales to meet user demands. In this lesson, we’ll explore deploying a NestJS app to Amazon ECS using Docker. Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service running Docker containers at scale.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open-source platform for developing, distributing, and executing applications within isolated environments called containers. These lightweight units package up applications and their dependencies, providing consistency and ease when transitioning between different systems. By virtualizing only the application runtime environment instead of entire VMs, Docker streamlines the deployment process by minimizing hardware requirements and addressing potential compatibility concerns.

To deploy a NestJS app, we’ll build a Docker image and run it in a container with the application and its dependencies. Once it’s in the container, we can be sure it will run smoothly on any computer or server with Docker installed. This makes our NestJS app portable, and it also makes deployment much simpler and more consistent.

Amazon ECR and ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a Docker container registry provided by AWS. It allows users to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. ECR seamlessly integrates with Amazon ECS, creating a streamlined workflow for containerized applications.

ECR serves as a repository for storing and versioning Docker container images. Users can push and pull images to and from ECR, ensuring a centralized and secure location for their container images.

ECS is a container orchestration service provided by AWS. It simplifies the deployment and management of containerized applications and allows us to run Docker containers on a scalable infrastructure. ECS contains some key components:

• Fargate: This is a technology designed for running Docker containers in the cloud. It allows us to run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure. With Fargate, we don’t need to provision or manage server instances to run the containers. Instead, AWS handles the infrastructure for us.