Deploying Temporal on AWS ECS with Terraform

Summary

👋 Introduction#Most of Temporal’s official deployment guides focus on Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is powerful and battle-tested for large-scale workloads, it also comes with significant overhead — both financially (AWS EKS clusters aren’t cheap 💸) and operationally (node upgrades, cluster maintenance, networking complexity).For many teams, especially when just getting started, that’s more than you actually need.This guide walks through deploying Temporal workers on AWS ECS with Terraform. Using ECS (especially with Fargate) can reduce infrastructure costs by ~70% while still providing elasticity, resilience, and production-ready reliability. 💪📓 NoteAmazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed service for running Docker containers on AWS.It allows you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications without manually handling servers or complex orchestrations.ECS gives you two ways to run containers:ECS on EC2 — you manage the EC2 instances that run your containers.ECS on Fargate (The focus of this blog) — AWS manages the infrastructure; you just define your containers and how many to run. This gives you a completely serverless architecture.ECS handles container scheduling, load balancing, scaling, and networking — so you can focus on your application, not the plumbing.🏆 By the end, you’ll have:#Auto-scaling Temporal workers on ECS (prioritizing Fargate Spot instances when available).Terraform-managed infrastructure with remote state in S3.Optionally, CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions to build, publish, and deploy.A working Temporal workflow with one activity.In short: a reproducible, extensible setup you can grow into production just by adding your business logic.🐦 Bird’s-Eye View#Before diving into the setup, let’s zoom out and see how all the pieces fit together.You’re running Temporal Cloud or Self-hosting Temporal Server as the orchestration layer, while your workers live inside AWS ECS Fargate, and all of it is wrapped in infrastructure-as-...