Please note that this workshop has been archived and is not actively maintained. On September 30, 2026, AWS will discontinue support for AWS App Mesh. For more information, visit this blog post.
Use Cloud Map based service discovery
Until now, the way our frontend application running in the EC2 instances was talking to the backend Crystal service running in the ECS Cluster and Nodejs backend running in Amazon EKS was by using two dedicated Load Balancers.
Part of the transition to microservices and modern architectures involves having dynamic, autoscaling, and robust services that can respond quickly to failures and changing loads. A modern architectural best practice is to loosely couple these services by allowing them to specify their own dependencies. Compared to dedicated load balancing, service discovery (client side load balancing) can help improve resiliency, and convenience in dynamic and large microservice environments.
AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Cloud Map enables you to name your application resources with custom names, and it automatically updates the locations of these dynamically changing resources.
The objective of this chapter is to change the way the Frontend application talks to the Crystal and NodeJS Backend application by configuring the integration between AWS App Mesh and AWS Cloud Map.