The AWS Deployment Toolbox

A quick map of the AWS services you will use to build, ship, and run applications.

AWS has hundreds of services, but only a handful matter for deployment. Here is the toolbox this guide uses.

Compute — where your code runs

  • EC2 — virtual servers you manage.
  • ECS / Fargate — run containers without managing servers.
  • Lambda — run functions on demand, no servers at all.
  • Amplify / Elastic Beanstalk — opinionated, hands-off hosting.

Delivery, storage & networking

  • S3 — object storage for files and static sites.
  • CloudFront — global content delivery network (CDN).
  • Route 53 — DNS and domain management.
  • ACM — free TLS/HTTPS certificates.
  • ELB/ALB — load balancers that spread traffic.

Automation & operations

  • CloudFormation / Terraform — infrastructure as code.
  • CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeploy — CI/CD.
  • ECR — private Docker image registry.
  • CloudWatch — logs, metrics, and alarms.
  • IAM — permissions for everything above.

Example

Example · bash
# The AWS CLI is your gateway to every service
aws --version
aws configure    # set access key, secret, region, output format
aws sts get-caller-identity   # confirm who you are authenticated as

When to use it

  • A backend developer uses the AWS CLI to script deployments so the same commands run locally and inside CI.
  • An infrastructure team uses CloudFormation to provision VPCs, subnets, and security groups in a repeatable way.
  • A DevOps engineer uses the CDK to define an ECS Fargate service in TypeScript and deploy it with a single command.

More examples

Configure a named AWS CLI profile

Sets up a named AWS CLI profile so you can easily switch between accounts and regions.

Example · bash
# Configure a named profile for a specific AWS account
aws configure --profile myapp-prod
# Prompts: Access Key ID, Secret Key, Region, Output format

# Use the profile in any command
aws s3 ls --profile myapp-prod

List ECS services in a cluster

Uses the AWS CLI to inspect what services are running in an ECS cluster, a common toolbox check.

Example · bash
# List running services in an ECS cluster
aws ecs list-services \
  --cluster my-prod-cluster \
  --output table

Bootstrap CDK in target account

Prepares an AWS account to host CDK-deployed stacks by creating the required S3 bucket and IAM roles.

Example · bash
# Install AWS CDK globally and bootstrap the target account/region
npm install -g aws-cdk
cdk bootstrap aws://123456789012/us-east-1 \
  --profile myapp-prod

Related

deploy compute targetsdeploy intro

Discussion

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