AWS ECS

The Things Stack can be deployed to AWS as a set of highly available services on AWS ECS using AWS CloudFormation.

This guide gives an overview of the architecture and shows how to deploy your own highly available The Things Stack cluster.

Who is it for?

The AWS ECS deployment option is for professional, large-scale and multi-tenant deployments.

This deployment option is significantly more complicated than other deployment options. In order to deploy and operate The Things Stack in this configuration, you will need to be comfortable working with and operating the following concepts:

  • AWS VPC
  • AWS RDS
  • AWS ElastiCache
  • AWS EC2
  • AWS ECS
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • Shell and command line usage
  • AWS command line interface

Architecture

This page describes the architecture of a The Things Stack deployment on AWS ECS.
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Prerequisites

This page describes what you need for deploying The Things Stack on AWS ECS.
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Deployment

This page describes the steps for deploying The Things Stack on AWS ECS.
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Database Operations

This page describes the steps for performing database operations on an AWS ECS deployment.
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Monitoring

This page describes how you can monitor a The Things Stack deployment on AWS ECS.
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Updating

This page describes the steps for updating The Things Stack on AWS ECS.
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Best Practices

This page describes best practices of a The Things Stack deployment on AWS ECS. Stack Naming Templates are numbered in suggested order of deployment. This doesn’t mean that numbering won’t change in the future. Our suggested naming scheme is $PREFIX-$NAME, where $PREFIX is some prefix specific to your deployment. Staging Performing maintenance operations requires in-depth knowledge of AWS and The Things Stack. It is likely that certain action might have unexpected results.
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Interoperability

The Things Stack exposes a subset of the Join Server API defined by LoRaWAN® Backend Interfaces 1.0 and 1.1. This is used for interoperability between LoRaWAN networks.
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Mutual TLS

New in 3.30.0

The Things Stack supports mutual TLS authentication via a supported proxy (Envoy and Traefik).
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Troubleshooting AWS ECS Deployment

This section contains information to troubleshoot The Things Stack deployment. ECS pulled wrong image version The image tags starting with 3.x contain the latest patch version. For this reason, you should use images starting with 3.x.y, where you specify the desired patch version yourself. Otherwise, when for some reason an ECS task restarts, it can pull the 3.x image again, which could be in the meantime updated to a new patch version.
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Template Changelog

Upgrading All meaningful changes to templates are documented in this file. Unreleased 3.32.0 Add support for managed gateways via The Things Gateway Controller. The Gateway Configuration Server and Device Claiming Server use TLS client authentication. When using AWS Private CA (CertificateAuthorityARN in 4-2a-configuration), the client certificate can be issued automatically. To specify a custom TLS client certificate, enable EnableTTGCCustomCertificate in 4-1-secrets and specify the certificate and key according to the format in the description.
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