On August 21, 2025, I gave my first JAWS-UG presentation at JAWS-UG Containers for Beginners #8. My talk, From Docker to Amazon ECS: What to Know Before Heading Out into the AWS Ocean, covered the concerns that appear when an application moves beyond a local Docker environment.
About JAWS-UG Containers
JAWS-UG stands for AWS User Group - Japan. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run community with regional chapters and chapters organized around technical themes. The Containers chapter focuses on running container workloads on AWS.
This beginner edition was an in-person lightning-talk meetup for engineers starting with containers on AWS. Speakers shared early projects, lessons, and questions rather than assuming production experience with Amazon ECS.
What I shared
Local AWS emulators such as LocalStack make it possible to work quickly without cloud credentials, but they hide several parts of a real deployment. I organized the gap into three areas:
- CI/CD: understanding how source changes become images in Amazon ECR and new Amazon ECS tasks
- Permissions: separating the GitHub Actions role, ECS task execution role, and application task role
- Observability: moving from local container output to workflow logs and Amazon CloudWatch Logs
The talk treated local emulation as a useful starting point, while emphasizing that deployment design, IAM, logging, cost, secrets, and networking need separate attention before an application reaches AWS.