RDS DB migrations using ECS and Fargate

Question

I run my app with Docker and ECS. How can I handle database migrations? With fargate there doesn’t seem to be a way to SSH into the container to run any commands so I can’t run my RDS MySQL migrations by going into the container. I have some migrations to run at times, not for all deploys. Any advice?

I used to run my docker container in a EC2 box so I had the option to run a command inside the container once the container is up. I have migrated to ECS and Fargate now and I don't know how to handle it now.

Answer 1

If you already have the script/tool in place to execute the database migrations then what you might need is to run the tool/script once. AWS ECS allows to schedule the executions of tasks (containers), you can set it up in a way that the container can run just only once.

These ECS tasks can be scheduled via a cron-like job setup or on a CloudWatch event response:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/scheduled_tasks.html