Posted On: Dec 19, 2019

Amazon Elastic Container Service released a new command line interface (CLI) with an emphasis on usability and developer productivity to quickly launch and easily manage applications on ECS powered by AWS Fargate. The new ECS CLI in preview provides a simple declarative set of commands including examples and guided experiences built in to help customers deploy quickly. The CLI creates all resources and artifacts required to deploy to ECS and configures best practices on behalf of the user, allowing them to focus on writing application code.

There are a lot of steps in the application lifecycle for containers outside of writing code including container registries, preparing a task definition or pod spec, or configuring an orchestrator. Completing these tasks and managing the applications are usually accomplished through a number of tools such as the AWS CLI, the console, and CloudFormation. However, these tools require specific knowledge of AWS service primitives such as various load balancers or a VPC just to get an application running and accessible via a public endpoint. Customers want to get up and running quickly, manage their workloads easily, and deploy effortlessly to production-safe environments.

This new ECS CLI has a user friendly design and includes example command prompts and guided walkthroughs to deploy highly integrated applications without AWS and ECS specific terminology. Once the application code is ready, the CLI automates each step in the deployment lifecycle, including Docker build, pushing to a registry, creating a task definition, and creating a cluster to run the task. Customers can not only deploy more easily with a pipeline set up on their behalf, but also can perform operations including scaling, troubleshooting, managing staging and production environments, and configuration changes all through the CLI itself.

The CLI is available in preview for download today for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

  • Download the new ECS CLI binary from our latest release here.
  • Connect with us and learn more about the project on our open source GitHub repository.
  • Read our announcement on the AWS Containers blog.
  • Learn more about Amazon ECS, through our product documentation.