AWS ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Run Docker containers on Fargate (serverless) or self-managed EC2 instances with deep AWS integration.

Core Concepts

• Cluster — logical grouping of tasks and services
• Task Definition — blueprint for containers (image, CPU, memory, ports, env vars)
• Task — a running instance of a task definition
• Service — maintains desired count of tasks, integrates with ALB
• Fargate — serverless compute for containers, no EC2 management
• ECR — Elastic Container Registry for storing Docker images

Cluster Setup

# Create a Fargate cluster
aws ecs create-cluster --cluster-name app-prod --capacity-providers FARGATE FARGATE_SPOT