1.1 Project Overview

Overview of Project ☁️

Scenario

FreshEats, a fast-growing food delivery startup, is rapidly adding new features to its backend services to support menus, pricing updates, and promotions.

Currently, the engineering team:

  • Builds and deploys applications manually
  • Runs updates directly on servers
  • Faces downtime during deployments
  • Experiences inconsistent environments across releases

As the platform scales, this approach leads to:

  • Slower release cycles
  • Deployment errors
  • Difficulty rolling out fixes quickly
  • Increased operational risk

To support frequent releases and improve reliability, the team decides to adopt a modern DevOps approach using containerization and automated CI/CD pipelines on AWS.

Our Solution

The goal is to design and implement a fully automated CI/CD pipeline that takes application code from development to production without downtime.

  • The application is containerized using Docker
  • Container images are stored securely in Amazon ECR
  • The application runs on Amazon ECS Fargate (serverless containers)
  • Traffic is managed through an Application Load Balancer
  • Deployments are automated using GitHub Actions

Every code change pushed to GitHub automatically:

  1. Builds a new container image
  2. Pushes it to ECR
  3. Deploys the updated version to ECS

This ensures consistent deployments, faster releases, and production-grade reliability.

About the Project

In this hands-on project, you’ll build a real-world DevOps CI/CD pipeline similar to what modern SaaS teams use in production.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Containerize applications using Docker
  • Manage container images with Amazon ECR
  • Deploy serverless containers using Amazon ECS Fargate
  • Expose services securely with an Application Load Balancer
  • Configure networking and security groups correctly
  • Automate deployments using GitHub Actions
  • Validate deployments visually through a frontend UI

By the end of this project, you’ll have a production-ready, automated deployment pipeline that clearly demonstrates DevOps skills recruiters look for.

Steps To Be Performed 👩‍💻

We’ll build the CI/CD pipeline step by step:

  1. Understand and run the application locally
  2. Containerize the application using Docker
  3. Push the container image to Amazon ECR
  4. Deploy the containerized app on ECS Fargate
  5. Configure load balancing and security groups
  6. Automate deployments using GitHub Actions

Services Used 🛠

  • Docker → Containerize the application
  • Amazon ECR → Store and manage container images
  • Amazon ECS (Fargate) → Run containers without managing servers
  • Application Load Balancer → Route traffic to containers
  • AWS IAM → Manage secure permissions for services and CI/CD
  • GitHub Actions → Build and deploy the application automatically
  • Amazon CloudWatch → Monitor logs and task execution

Estimated Time & Cost ⚙️

  • Estimated Time: 3–4 hours
  • Cost: $0–$2 (within AWS Free Tier when cleaned up properly)

➡️ Architectural Diagram

The architecture includes:

➡️ Final Result

Once completed, you’ll have:

  • A fully automated CI/CD pipeline
  • Zero-downtime deployments for a containerized application
  • A live web application accessible via a load balancer
  • A portfolio-ready DevOps project demonstrating real-world practices

Complete and Continue