📌 Overview
Welcome to my forth project in the DevOps Challenge, this project gave me a real-world experience and exposure to understand of how APIs, containers, and cloud infrastructure all work together in real-world applications. The Containerized Sports API Management System pushed me to explore more AWS services like ECS (Fargate), ECR, and API Gateway, all built with Terraform.
🛠️ Project Architecture
What This Project Does
✅ Fetches Sports Data: Retrieves real-time sports data from the SerpAPI. ✅ Containerized Backend: Runs a Flask API inside a Docker container. ✅ Deploys to AWS ECS (Fargate): Ensures a fully managed, serverless infrastructure. ✅ Exposes REST API: Uses API Gateway to provide a secure endpoint. ✅ Monitors with CloudWatch: Tracks API activity and logs errors.
🔧 Tools & Technologies
- Python 3 for the app logic
- Flask for the web framework
- Docker for containerizing the app
- AWS (ECS, API Gateway, ECR, CloudWatch, IAM)
- Terraform for Infrastructure as Code
Prerequisites
- Before you start, make sure you have:
- AWS Account: Sign up if you don’t have one.
- AWS CLI Installed: Configure AWS CLI with valid credentials.
- Terraform Installed: Used for provisioning AWS infrastructure.
- SerpAPI Key: Obtain an API Key from SerpAPI.
- Docker Installed: Required for building and running containers.
⚙️ AWS Services Breakdown
✅ ECR Reposiory: Stores the docker image in the cloud. ✅ ECS Cluster: Runs the containerized Flask application. ✅ ECS Task Definition: Defines CPU, memory, and environment settings. ✅ ECS Service: Ensures the Flask API runs consistently. ✅ Application Load Balancer: Routes traffic securely. ✅ API Gateway: Exposes the API to external consumers. ✅ CloudWatch Logs: Captures API logs for debugging and monitoring. ✅ IAM Roles: Implements least-privilege access control. ✅ Security Groups: Enforces secure network communication.
🤔 Challenges
- IAM Permissions: IAM roles and policies took time to get right, especially when attaching them to ECS tasks.
- API Gateway Integration: Took a bit of trial and error to properly wire up the API Gateway to ECS.
- ECR Compatibility: Ensuring the image build architecture matched what Fargate needed (
--platform linux/amd64) tripped me up for a bit.
🎓 Lessons Learned
This project helped me:
- Understand how to write Terraform modules that are reusable and readable
- Get hands-on with ECS Fargate, which is surprisingly easy once you get past the initial learning curve
- Appreciate the value of logging and monitoring in production systems
- Realize the power of API Gateway to add a layer of abstraction and security
🎯 Future Plans
- Add a caching layer with ElastiCache for frequently requested data
- Store historical query data in DynamoDB
- Secure the API with keys or Cognito
- Add a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions
🚮 Clean-Up Instructions
Don’t forget to clean up your resources when you’re done!
terraform destroy -var="sports_api_key=<Enter your SerpAPI key>" -auto-approve