AWS ECS Setup & Configuration

A production-ready ECS cluster with task definitions for your containers, ECS services with desired count and deployment configuration, Application Load Balancer with target groups and health checks, auto-scaling policies based on CPU/memory or custom metrics, ECR repositories for container images, and a CI/CD pipeline that builds, pushes, and deploys on every merge to main.

Fargate eliminates server management — you define CPU and memory per task, and AWS handles the rest. EC2 launch type gives you more control over instance types, GPU access, and cost (especially with spot instances). We recommend Fargate for most workloads and EC2 for GPU, high-memory, or cost-sensitive workloads. Many clusters use both.

Task definitions specify container images, CPU/memory allocation, environment variables, secrets from AWS Secrets Manager, logging configuration, and health check commands. Services maintain the desired number of running tasks, handle rolling deployments with configurable minimum healthy percent, and integrate with load balancer target groups.

ECS tasks run in awsvpc networking mode with dedicated ENIs in private subnets. Security groups control traffic at the task level. IAM task roles provide least-privilege access to AWS services. Secrets Manager stores database credentials, API keys, and other sensitive configuration. CloudWatch Logs captures container stdout/stderr.

Application Auto Scaling adjusts the number of running tasks based on CloudWatch metrics. We configure target tracking policies for CPU and memory utilization, and step scaling policies for custom metrics like queue depth or request latency. Scale-in protection prevents aggressive downscaling during traffic dips.

Purchase the engagement, submit your async brief with your container requirements and traffic patterns, and receive a production-ready ECS setup within 5–7 business days. Terraform code, deployment pipeline, and operational runbooks included.