Amazon ECS / Fargate Deployment
Containers that deploy without downtime, and that stop deploying when the new version is broken.
From $649 3–7 days
Docker Application Deployment on AWS
Your containers running on AWS with secrets out of the environment and logs off the disk.
Price and scope
From $459
Typically $459–$1,099, fixed in writing before anything starts.
What moves it up
- An application not yet containerised, so the Dockerfile is part of the work
- More than one service, where they have to find each other and start in order
- A build that currently happens on somebody's laptop
Some of this you can check yourself, right now, for free: Docker Compose Checker →
What actually goes wrong
The compose file works on the laptop, so it gets copied to an EC2 instance and started, and that is the deployment. What it inherits is every assumption a development environment is allowed to make: secrets passed as environment variables and visible to anyone who can run docker inspect, no restart policy so a crashed container stays down until somebody notices, and json-file logging with no rotation, quietly filling the root volume until the disk is full and everything stops at once.
How I find it
docker inspect <container> — read the Env array, and see what is sitting in itdocker compose config, to see what the file actually resolves to rather than what it looks likedf -h and du -sh /var/lib/docker/containers — how much of the disk the logs have takenaws ecr describe-repositories — whether images are built somewhere repeatable or on a laptop
What you get
- Images built reproducibly and pushed to ECR, tagged so a deploy names a version rather than "latest"
- Secrets in Secrets Manager or Parameter Store, injected at runtime and absent from the image
- Restart policies and health checks, so a crashed container comes back without a human
- Logs shipped to CloudWatch with retention set, off the instance disk
- A documented deploy and rollback, runnable by somebody who did not build it
Questions
Should I be on ECS instead of Docker on an EC2 instance?
If you have one service and a small team, an EC2 instance running compose is honest and cheap and I will happily leave you on it. ECS earns its complexity when you need rolling deploys without downtime, or more than one instance. I will tell you which you are, not sell you the more expensive answer by default.
My app is not containerised yet. Is that included?
It is, at the upper end of the range — writing a production Dockerfile is real work and it is where most of the variation in this price comes from. A multi-stage build, a non-root user and a genuinely small final image are part of it, not extras.
What happens to my data when a container is replaced?
Nothing, provided it was never inside the container to begin with — which is the thing this work checks first. Anything stateful moves to a volume, RDS or S3 before the deploy process starts replacing containers, because that is the point at which the shortcut becomes data loss.
Can you keep using docker compose rather than moving to something else?
Yes. Compose in production is a defensible choice for a single-host workload, and swapping it for an orchestrator you did not ask for is how a straightforward deployment turns into a platform migration. The problems above are all fixable without leaving it.
If this is not quite it
EC2 Server Setup & Hardening
A server built the way you would build it on day 400, not day one.
From $199 1–2 days
Want this done?
Tell me what you are running and I will come back with a fixed price and a date. If it turns out you do not need this, I will say that instead.
Prefer to talk? Book a free call ↗ · Or hire me on Upwork ↗ · Typical reply within one business day.
Before you enquire
When I answer
Sunday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00 EET. Outside that I will still look, but I will not promise a time.
No 24/7 desk, and I will not pretend otherwise
One person, one time zone. If round-the-clock cover is what you need, you need a team, and I will say so rather than sell you a plan that cannot deliver it.
Your AWS bill stays yours
You pay Amazon directly and you keep control of the account. Nothing here resells your infrastructure or sits between you and your own billing.
A price that starts with "from" is a starting price
Every service page lists exactly what pushes a quote above it, before you ask. You get a fixed number in writing before any work begins.