📋 AWS Containers Cheat Sheet

Quick-reference for ECS, EKS, ECR, Fargate, task definitions, service auto scaling, and container-based deployment pipelines.

Why This Cheat Sheet Matters for DOP-C02

This cheat sheet covers the most important Containers (ECS/EKS) concepts tested on the DOP-C02 (AWS DevOps Engineer Professional) certification exam. It contains 4 sections with 16 key points that you should memorize before exam day. Master ECS task definitions, Fargate, EKS, ECR, service auto scaling, task placement, rolling updates, and container-based CI/CD pipelines. Use this as a quick-reference guide during your final review sessions.

4Sections
16Key Points

ECS Core Concepts

  • Cluster → Service → Task (running instance of task definition)
  • Launch types: Fargate (serverless) or EC2 (self-managed)
  • Task definition: container definitions, CPU/memory, IAM roles, networking
  • Task role (application permissions) vs execution role (pull image, logs)

ECS Deployments

  • Rolling update: minimum healthy percent + maximum percent
  • Blue/green (CodeDeploy): new task set, traffic shift, original terminated
  • Circuit breaker: auto-rollback on repeated task failures
  • Capacity providers: Fargate, Fargate Spot, or EC2 ASG

ECR

  • Private registry per account per region
  • Image scanning: on-push or continuous (Enhanced with Inspector)
  • Lifecycle policies: expire old/untagged images automatically
  • Cross-account and cross-region replication

EKS & Fargate

  • Managed Kubernetes control plane with auto-upgrades
  • Node groups: managed, self-managed, or Fargate profiles
  • IRSA: IAM Roles for Service Accounts (pod-level permissions)
  • EKS Anywhere: on-premises Kubernetes with EKS tooling

Practice Containers Questions

Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.

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