AWS ECS Fargate + Python + Nginx

Question

Hey,

I would like to start a small website that will be entirely handled in Python. I will be using the Flask framework for this. So far I had a lot of contact with AWS ECS and ELB service, but I admit, Python itself is still unknown to me. That's why I have a few questions:

1. I understand that from the point of view of a software engineer it is better to separate the backend and frontend - so it is best to create two separate Python projects based on Flask - one will be the API, the other the frontend, right? Generally, both should be separate services in the ECS service I guess.

2. In such configuration do they both have to use some kind of WSGI server, like gunicorn? Is this a good solution to run inside Fargate with multiple vCPU?

3. There are quite a few questions and myths around Nginx for this solution. Until now I assumed that if I use Application Load Balancer it should be enough (after all it also acts as reverse proxy). Is it necessary to use Nginx as a sidecar in ECS, are there any benefits of this? Assuming that using Nginx would be advisable, should it be only for the frontend or also for API?

Thank you really in advance for any supportive advice here - I know that I have asked for a lot of things.

Answer 1

In my consideration

1- if you want to have a microservice concept you can separate you application with front-end and back-end each of them has their freameworks. for front-end you can use Angular , React , Vuejs and so on. Python is backend technology and you can write strong restfull api to communicate with you front-end application

2- if you containerize your application with for example Docker and write Dockerfile for each service witch it is most common in microservice it is okay to run your container with any servers like nginx,apache or WSGI server(i did not work with this) then expose port (if it is needed) to be accessible

3- when you run your service in AWS Fargate it is possible to connect loadbalancer to your service and a service itself run tasks each task actually is one or more container with may be nginx server or something else, if you mean that it is normal to have nginx in your container.