Lab write-up · sanitized, no company IP

ECS Fargate microservice

A containerized API running on AWS ECS Fargate with least-privilege IAM, provisioned end-to-end by Terraform and deployed through GitHub Actions.

AWSECS (Fargate)DockerTerraformGitHub Actions

// goal

Run a simple containerized API on ECS Fargate with least-privilege IAM, provisioned by Terraform — no servers to patch, no fleet to manage.

// architecture

      ALB (or public service) → ECS Service (Fargate) → Task (Docker image from ECR)
Logs → CloudWatch; configuration via environment variables / SSM Parameter Store

// quick start

Local build → ECR → ECS, in three steps. Assumes a repo with an app/ directory (Dockerfile) and a terraform/ directory.

1. Build the app locally

cd app
docker build -t ecs-lab:demo .

2. Create the ECR repo (once) and push the image

aws ecr create-repository --repository-name ecs-lab
aws ecr get-login-password --region REGION | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.REGION.amazonaws.com
docker tag ecs-lab:demo ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.REGION.amazonaws.com/ecs-lab:demo
docker push ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.REGION.amazonaws.com/ecs-lab:demo

3. Wire up the ECS service with Terraform

cd ../terraform
terraform init
terraform apply

// what this demonstrates

      Containerizing an API in Docker
Managing image lifecycle through ECR
Infrastructure as code with Terraform (cluster, service, task definition)
CI/CD with GitHub Actions: build the image, push it to ECR, and roll out a new task definition to the ECS service

    

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