Deployment overview

The goal of the next two chapters is to establish the supporting infrastructure and resources to deploy Docker applications using AWS. In the spirit of the best practice of defining your infrastructure as code, you will be defining a CloudFormation template that will include all AWS resources required to support your Docker applications running in ECS. As you progress through each chapter, you will build on this template, slowly but surely adding more and more resources until you have a complete solution for deploying your Docker applications in AWS using ECS.

With this in mind, the focus of this chapter is to learn how to build ECS clusters using CloudFormation, and as you have already learned in previous chapters, an ECS cluster is a collection of ECS container instances that you can target when you run an ECS service or ECS task.

ECS clusters themselves are very simple constructs - they simply define a collection of ECS container instances and a cluster name. How these...