Configuring an EC2 Auto Scaling group

You have established an ECS cluster, but without ECS container instances to provide a container runtime and compute resources, the cluster is not of much use. At this point, you could create individual ECS container instances and join them to the cluster, however, such an approach is not feasible if you have the requirement to run production workloads that need to support tens or hundreds of containers, dynamically adding and removing ECS container instances to the cluster depending on the current resource requirements of the cluster.

The AWS mechanism to deliver such behavior for your ECS container instances is the EC2 Auto Scaling group, which operates as a collection of EC2 instances that share identical configurations referred to as launch configurations. The EC2 Auto Scaling service is a managed service provided by AWS, and takes care of managing the lifecycle your EC2 Auto Scaling groups and the EC2 instances that make up the group. This mechanism...