Deploy docling to AWS ECS: A Complete Guide

#aws #aidev #docling #tutorial

I want to share key insights from my journey deploying Docling to AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service). Rather than overwhelming you with one massive tutorial, I've structured this as a three-part series that mirrors the logical flow of AWS infrastructure setup.

Series Overview

Part 1: Foundation – Networking & IAM
Setting up the essential building blocks: VPC configuration, security groups, and IAM roles. Since networking and permissions form the backbone of any AWS deployment, we'll establish these fundamentals first.

Part 2: Setting up the Workhorse – EC2
Configuring the compute infrastructure that will run our containers: Auto Scaling Groups (ASG), EC2 launch templates, and instance profiles.

Part 3: ECS & Application Load Balancer
Creating ECS tasks and services, then configuring an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to provide external access to our Docling deployment.

Why This Structure?

Cloud deployments require significant upfront investment in networking and security configuration. By tackling these foundational elements first, we create a solid platform for our application infrastructure. The EC2 layer serves as our container runtime environment, while ECS orchestrates our application containers on top of this foundation.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have:

Basic familiarity with AWS concepts and services
An active AWS account with appropriate permissions.
AWS CLI installed and configured on your local machine

If you need to set up the AWS CLI, follow the installation and configuration steps in the AWS documentation to get started. For those comfortable taking a calculated risk and wanting to get started quickly, you can use your root user AWS access key and secret for initial setup and learning purposes.