aws-cloudformation-ecs_skill

Overview

This skill provides production-ready AWS CloudFormation patterns for provisioning ECS clusters, services, and task definitions. It focuses on container configuration, ALB integration, scaling, service discovery, and blue/green deployments with CodeDeploy. Use it to structure templates with Parameters, Mappings, Conditions, Outputs, cross-stack references, and nested stacks.

How this skill works

The skill supplies reusable CloudFormation constructs and example templates that define ECS clusters, EC2/Fargate task definitions, and services wired to Application Load Balancers and Cloud Map. It includes patterns for IAM roles, log configuration, auto scaling policies, target groups, ALB listeners, and CodeDeploy hooks for blue/green deployments. Templates show parameter validation, SSM references, export/import for cross-stack references, and nested stacks for modular deployments.

When to use it

• Creating a new ECS cluster and related networking via CloudFormation
• Defining task definitions for Fargate or EC2 with container images, secrets, and health checks
• Integrating ECS services with an Application Load Balancer and target groups
• Implementing service discovery using AWS Cloud Map
• Configuring autoscaling for services with target tracking or step policies
• Implementing blue/green or zero-downtime deploys using CodeDeploy and ALB traffic shifting

Best practices

• Use typed AWS parameter types (VpcId, SubnetIds, ARNs) for runtime validation
• Keep templates modular: use nested stacks or separate network and application stacks with exports/imports
• Store container images and sensitive values in SSM Parameter Store or Secrets Manager and reference them in templates
• Define IAM roles and least-privilege policies for task execution and service actions
• Include CloudWatch Logs configuration and container health checks for observability and safe deployments
• Use Mapping and Conditions to adapt instance types, capacity, and limits across dev/staging/production

Example use cases

• Deploy a Fargate service with autoscaling behind an ALB and Cloud Map discovery
• Create an EC2-backed ECS cluster with autoscaling group, instance user data, and container insights enabled
• Build a CI/CD pipeline that performs blue/green deployments using CodeDeploy and CloudFormation hooks
• Split infrastructure into network stack (VPC/subnets/security groups) and application stack that imports exported values
• Define task definitions that include environment variables, secrets from SSM/Secrets Manager, and awslogs configuration