From Code to Service: Secure ECS Deployments with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Blue-Green Strategy

Deploying containers on AWS is powerful, but combining security, automation, and zero-downtime releases can be challenging. In this talk, I’ll share how I built a secure and resilient CI/CD pipeline using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Amazon ECS to manage containerized applications with a blue-green deployment strategy.

Attendees will learn:
- How to use Terraform to provision ECS resources securely (VPC, subnets, IAM, task roles, and ALB)
- Best practices for hosting Docker containers in Amazon ECS with a focus on security and isolation
- Building a robust CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions, including workflow structure, secrets management, and deployment logic
- Implementing blue-green deployments with ECS and how to manage traffic shifts safely using AWS CodeDeploy

Real lessons learned: what worked, what didn’t, and how I handled issues in production.

This session is great for developers and DevOps engineers who want to improve their deployment workflows confidently and ship while keeping things secure and infrastructure-as-code driven.

Please note: I have already written about this and my code is ready: https://github.com/kunduso/add-aws-ecr-ecs-fargate

Optimizing infrastructure workflows with ephemeral workspaces in HCP Terraform

In today’s fast-paced cloud-native development world, infrastructure management is often a dynamic process that requires flexibility, speed, and scalability. HashiCorp Terraform has long been a go-to tool for infrastructure as code (IaC), but as teams embrace more agile and continuous development workflows, there is an increasing need for lightweight, disposable, and cost-efficient environments. This is where ephemeral workspaces in HCP Terraform come in.

In this talk, I’ll explore the power of ephemeral workspaces—temporary, isolated environments that can be created and destroyed automatically/on-demand in the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Designed to streamline infrastructure workflows, ephemeral workspaces enable developers, operations teams, and DevOps practitioners to work faster and with greater flexibility by removing the overhead of long-lived environments.

I’ll start with an introduction to HCP Terraform and how it extends the Terraform experience with managed cloud services. Attendees will learn about ephemeral workspaces, which allow the spinning up and tear down of entire infrastructure environments quickly and easily, all within the HashiCorp ecosystem.

Throughout the talk, I’ll cover key use cases where ephemeral workspaces are effective:

CI/CD Pipelines: Use HCP Terraform VCS integration to deploy infrastructure for changes made in the GitHub repository
Experimentation and Sandboxing: Developers can quickly test infrastructure changes or try out new configurations in a disposable, isolated environment—without risking their production systems or incurring long-term costs.
Cost Efficiency: Ephemeral workspaces optimize infrastructure spend by ensuring that the infrastructure is auto-destroyed at a future date based on the configuration.

This talk will also feature a short live demo where the attendees see firsthand how to:
Create an ephemeral workspace from scratch in HCP Terraform.
Manage infrastructure within the workspace using Terraform’s familiar workflows.
Examine and enable the auto-destroy feature of HCP Terraform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCV_wO0QlnA