Amazon ECS extensions for AWS Cloud Development Kit now available as a Developer Preview

Posted on: Oct 1, 2020

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now has a developer preview module in the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which implements an extendable service construct. Instead of writing JSON task definitions for your services by hand, you can model and provision ECS resources using familiar programming languages. The new ECS service construct for CDK supports extensions that automatically add additional capabilities such as App Mesh or FireLens to your containerized services.

The CDK construct comes with built-in extensions for App Mesh, FireLens, the CloudWatch Agent, AWS X-Ray, HTTP Load Balancer, and CPU based application autoscaling. You can use these prebuilt extensions to easily attach these functionalities to your ECS services without needing in-depth knowledge of how to provision and configure the integrations. For example, the extensions automatically add the appropriate sidecar containers to your task, add IAM statements to your task role, and provision any external resources required.

In addition to using these prebuilt extensions you can also author your own drop-in extensions for members of your team, organization, or the broader open source community to reuse in their own infrastructure. 

To learn more you can find the ECS service extensions module on NPM, and read the CDK module documentation.