𝐃𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐖𝐒 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 — 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞’𝐬 𝐚 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝

rying to deploy container images to 𝐀𝐖𝐒 for the first time can feel overwhelming. There are a lot of steps, a lot of commands, and a surprising amount of jumping between the 𝐀𝐖𝐒 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐞, 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥, and the 𝐂𝐋𝐈 . And the deeper you go, the more granular everything becomes, IAM roles, task definitions, networking, security groups, subnets, VPCs… it’s a lot to keep straight.

In a real production environment, you’d typically automate all of this using Terraform, 𝐀𝐖𝐒 𝐂𝐃𝐊, or 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. Those tools give you clean, repeatable templates for spinning up ECS services and entire environments with a single command.

But before you automate anything, it’s incredibly valuable to understand how all the pieces fit together manually. Walking through the full flow, from building images to publishing to 𝐸𝐶𝑅, 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑖𝑔𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐼𝐴𝑀, 𝑠𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑢𝑝 𝑛𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝐶𝑆 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒, gives you a much deeper intuition for how 𝐀𝐖𝐒 actually works under the hood. That knowledge pays off later when you’re reading someone else’s 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦, debugging infrastructure issues, or designing your own deployment pipelines.

I put together a detailed, step‑by‑step guide that walks through the entire process clearly and practically. If you want a deeper dive into how to deploy containers on ECS Fargate the right way, you can read it here: https://hectorpacheco.hashnode.dev/mastering-aws-container-deployments-building-publishing-and-running-containers-on-fargate