Containerization and Flask Application Deployment

After a long journey, we’ve reached the last chapter! We’re thrilled beyond words! Right now, we are about to embark on the last lap of showcasing our full stack web application to the world. In today’s modern software development sphere, the pace of containerization adoption is rapidly increasing.

According to Gartner’s predictions, the adoption of containerized applications in production will increase significantly, with more than 75% of global organizations expected to utilize them by 2022, a notable increase from the less than 30% reported in 2020 (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3985796).

Containerization and the deployment of software applications have become essential skills needed for developers to stay modern and in demand. Developers who have the skills and knowledge to containerize and deploy software applications are better equipped to meet the demands of modern software development...

Technical requirements

The complete code for this chapter is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Full-Stack-Flask-and-React/tree/main/Chapter16.

Due to page count constraints, some of the long code blocks have been shortened. Please refer to GitHub for the complete code.

What is containerization?

Containerization is a software development practice that involves packaging an application and required dependencies into a self-contained unit called a container. A container is an isolated and lightweight runtime environment that provides a consistent and reproducible way to run an application across different computing environments.

Let’s say you have developed a web application using the Flask framework on your local machine running on MacOS. You want to deploy this application to a server running Ubuntu Linux in a production environment. However, there may be differences in the versions of the operating system, dependencies, or other system configurations that could affect the behavior of your application.

By packaging your Flask application and all the required dependencies into a container, you can ensure that the application runs consistently and reliably across different computing environments. The container will provide an isolated and...

Introducing Docker

Docker is a popular platform for developing, packaging, and deploying applications in containers. Before Docker’s invention, software developers had to deal with the problem of software dependencies, which meant that the software would work well on one computer but fail to work on another system.

Software developers would create programs on their computers, but when they tried to share them with other people, things often went wrong. Programs that worked perfectly on one computer might not have worked on another because of differences in the operating system, software versions, configuration files, or other system-related factors.

To solve this problem, a group of developers in 2013 released a tool called Docker. Docker lets developers package programs and all the necessary dependencies into something called a Docker image. A Docker image is a read-only template that contains the instructions for creating a Docker container. A Docker image includes the...

Dockerizing React and Flask applications

Dockerizing web applications allows developers to set up a consistent development environment across different machines. Dockerizing tools reduce the time and effort required to set up a new development environment. With Docker, developers can easily replicate the production environment on their local machines, test their code, and debug any issues before deploying it.

In this section, we will dockerize working applications for React and Flask, and make them ready to be shipped for production.

Let’s start with the React.

Bizza frontend application with React

Once you have created your React application, the initial step toward making it accessible to internet users is to build the application. Building a React application is an essential step in the development process to ensure that the application is optimized for production and performs as expected.

The building process takes the source code of a React project and transforms...

Understanding AWS ECR

Amazon ECR is a fully managed Docker registry service that makes it easy to store, manage, and deploy Docker images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon ECS to provide a seamless experience for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications at scale. Amazon ECR is designed to scale to meet the needs of even the most demanding containerized applications. Amazon ECR has security features to protect your container images, including encryption at rest and in transit, and role-based access control (RBAC).

To begin using Amazon ECR, the first step is to create an ECR repository. Please refer to the following screenshot of the Amazon ECR interface.

Click on the Get Started button to initiate the repository creation process. This will allow you to establish a dedicated location for storing your Docker images.

Figure 16.10 – AWS ECR

Next, we have a screenshot showcasing a public repository named packt-bizza-web...

Using Docker Compose

Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. Docker Compose provides a tool to define a set of containers and their relationships to each other, and then run them all with a single command.

With Docker Compose, developers can define the exact configuration of the application’s containers, including the images, environment variables, and network settings. This ensures that the application runs consistently across different environments and can be easily reproduced.

The following are a few components of Docker Compose we need to understand before we delve into details for configuration definitions:

• YAML file: A YAML file is used to define the configuration of your application’s containers. The YAML file specifies the images to use, ports to expose, environment variables, and any other settings that are required.
• Services: Each container in your application is defined as a service in the YAML...

Deploying React and Flask applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed AWS cloud service that allows developers to easily deploy and manage web applications and services on AWS. AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a platform that simplifies the process of deploying and managing web applications on AWS by automatically handling the infrastructure provisioning, load balancing, and scaling of the application.

You can deploy Elastic Beanstalk on a wide range of programming languages and web frameworks, including Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go. Elastic Beanstalk also integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon SNS to provide a complete solution for building and scaling web applications.

With Elastic Beanstalk, developers can easily focus on coding. Once you are ready to deploy your application, you can simply upload your application package or link to a repository, and then choose the appropriate platform and environment...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the world of containerization and deployment. We began by discussing what containerization is and why it is useful for modern software development. We then introduced Docker, the most popular containerization technology, and learned how to use it to package and deploy React and Flask applications.

Next, we explored the use of Docker Compose, a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. We learned how to use Docker Compose to orchestrate the deployment of our applications across multiple containers.

We also delved into AWS ECR, a fully managed container registry service that allows developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images securely and reliably. Finally, we looked at AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a service that simplifies the process of deploying, managing, and scaling web applications. We learned how to deploy our dockerized React and Flask applications to Elastic Beanstalk with all the features with...