A guide to deploying Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo without Kubernetes on AWS Fargate

Zach Swanson, a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer at Seniorlink, discusses the deployment of Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo on AWS Fargate without Kubernetes. Seniorlink, which supports families in home caregiving, sought to enhance their service observability by replacing a costly Graylog cluster with Loki and introducing Tempo for distributed tracing. Both Loki and Tempo utilize architecture from Cortex, facilitating scalable data flow and query processing. Despite the Grafana Labs' emphasis on Kubernetes, Swanson's team opted for AWS Fargate for its serverless capabilities, confronting challenges like task configuration and service discovery in the absence of Kubernetes' native tools. By leveraging AWS ECS Discovery and configuring task definitions with Gomplate for templated config files, the team successfully implemented a deployment strategy. They addressed network interface issues specific to Fargate 1.4.0 and emphasized the importance of graceful shutdowns to prevent data loss. The integration of these tools has significantly improved application monitoring and troubleshooting at Seniorlink.