ColdFusion on AWS EC2 vs Elastic Beanstalk vs ECS: Which Deployment Model Fits?

All three run ColdFusion — it’s a Java application (Tomcat/CFML), so anywhere Java runs reliably, ColdFusion runs — but they sit at different points on the control-vs-convenience spectrum, and one has an important ColdFusion-specific caveat. EC2 gives you full control: a virtual machine where you install ColdFusion (or launch Adobe’s official ColdFusion AMI from the AWS Marketplace) and manage everything yourself — best for lift-and-shift migrations, legacy apps, and teams that want OS-level control. Elastic Beanstalk is a managed PaaS layer over EC2 that handles provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and health monitoring for you — but note it has no native ColdFusion platform, so you run CF on Beanstalk via its Docker platform (a container), which makes “EB for ColdFusion” effectively a simpler on-ramp to containers. ECS (with AWS Fargate) is the modern, container-native path: you package ColdFusion in Docker and run it serverlessly with no servers to provision — AWS itself has published a reference architecture for running Adobe ColdFusion on ECS/Fargate with blue/green deployments. The decision rule: EC2 for control and lift-and-shift, ECS/Fargate for scalable modern container deployments, and Beanstalk (via Docker) as a middle ground when you want managed simplicity without hand-building an ECS setup. This guide compares all three with the ColdFusion-specific detail that matters.
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