Securing AWS Elastic Container Service: Isolating Containers for Enhanced Customer Privacy

Ensure Container Isolation in AWS Elastic Container Service for Enhanced Customer Privacy

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Question

You have docker containers that are going to be deployed in the AWS Elastic Container Service.

You need to ensure that the underlying EC2 instances hosting the containers cannot access each other (since containers may be used by different customers)

How can you accomplish this?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - D.

Q: How does Amazon ECS isolate containers belonging to different customers?

Amazon ECS schedules containers for execution on customer-controlled Amazon EC2 instances or with AWS Fargate and builds on the same isolation controls and compliance available for EC2 customers.

Your compute instances are located in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with an IP range that you specify.

You decide which instances are exposed to the Internet and which remain private.

Your EC2 instances use an IAM role to access the ECS service.

Your ECS tasks use an IAM role to access services and resources.

Security Groups and networks ACLs allow you to control inbound and outbound network access to and from your instances.

You can connect your existing IT infrastructure to resources in your VPC using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN connections.

You can provision your EC2 resources as Dedicated Instances.

Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.

Option A is incorrect since the Roles need to be assigned on the task level.

Options B and C are incorrect since access keys are not the ideal security practice.

For more information on Task IAM Roles in ECS, please refer to the below URL-

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/task-iam-roles.html

For more information on ECS, please check below AWS Docs.

https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/faqs/

The correct answer for the given question is D. Configure the Security Groups of the instances to allow only required traffic.

Explanation: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable and fully managed container orchestration service that allows users to easily run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster. When deploying Docker containers in Amazon ECS, the underlying EC2 instances need to be configured properly to ensure that they cannot access each other, as containers may be used by different customers.

The most appropriate way to accomplish this is to configure the Security Groups of the instances. Security Groups act as a virtual firewall for the instances and control inbound and outbound traffic. By configuring Security Groups, you can specify which ports and protocols are allowed to access the instances.

To ensure that the underlying EC2 instances hosting the containers cannot access each other, you should create a Security Group for each instance, and then configure the Security Group rules to allow only the required traffic. You can specify the IP address range or Security Group ID of the allowed traffic.

On the other hand, placing IAM Roles for the underlying EC2 Instances (Answer A) or placing access keys in the Docker containers (Answer B) or placing access keys in the EC2 Instances (Answer C) are not appropriate solutions to this problem. IAM Roles are used to grant permissions to AWS services, and access keys are used to provide programmatic access to AWS resources. They do not provide any control over network traffic between instances, which is what is required in this scenario.