Testing Professor
Testing ProfessorMulti-Cloud Guidebook · AWS
All services

Containers

Amazon ECS

Run containers on EC2 or Fargate, fully managed.

Official docs

Overview

Elastic Container Service orchestrates Docker containers as Tasks and Services with deep AWS integration (ALB, IAM, CloudWatch, VPC).

When to use it

  • Containerized apps without Kubernetes complexity
  • Mix of long-running services and scheduled tasks
  • Serverless containers via Fargate

Setup

  1. Create a cluster (Fargate is simplest).
  2. Define a Task Definition (image, CPU/mem, env, IAM role).
  3. Create a Service with desired count, ALB target group and auto-scaling.

How to use

Run a one-off Fargate task
aws ecs run-task --cluster qa --launch-type FARGATE --task-definition tests:3 --network-configuration '...'

QA use cases

  • Spin up ephemeral Fargate tasks per PR to run integration tests then terminate.
  • Schedule containerized Selenium grids using ECS Scheduled Tasks.