The Container Service template creates an infrastructure as code project in your favorite language that deploys a container service to AWS. You can then use the container service to build your own containerized application. The architecture includes [Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)](/registry/packages/aws/api-docs/ecs/cluster) for cluster management, [AWS Fargate](/registry/packages/awsx/api-docs/ecs/fargateservice/) to run the cluster on serverless compute, and an [Application Load Balancer](/registry/packages/awsx/api-docs/lb/) that serves the container endpoint to the internet. It also uses an [Amazon Elastic Container Repository (ECR)](/registry/packages/awsx/api-docs/ecr/repository) that stores the container image. The template generates a complete Pulumi program that provisions the cloud resources and installs Nginx in a container, providing you with a working project out of the box that you can customize easily and extend to suit your needs.
To use this template to deploy an ECS cluster that's running your container service, make sure you've [installed Pulumi](/docs/install/) and [configured your AWS credentials](/registry/packages/aws/installation-configuration#credentials), then create a new [project](/docs/concepts/projects/) using the template in your language of choice:
Follow the prompts to complete the new-project wizard. When it's done, you'll have a complete Pulumi project that's ready to deploy and configured with the most common settings. Feel free to inspect the code in {{<langfile>}} for a closer look.
The template requires no additional configuration. Once the new project is created, you can deploy it immediately with [`pulumi up`](/docs/cli/commands/pulumi_up):
Output values like these are useful in many ways, most commonly as inputs for other stacks or related cloud resources. The computed `url`, for example, can be used from the command line to open the newly deployed container service in your favorite web browser:
All of these settings are optional and may be adjusted either by editing the stack configuration file directly (by default, `Pulumi.dev.yaml`) or by changing their values with [`pulumi config set`](/docs/cli/commands/pulumi_config_set) as shown below.
If you already have a container image you'd like to build your container service with, you can do so either by replacing the Dockerfile in the `app` folder or by configuring the stack to point to another folder on your computer with the `image` setting:
```bash
$ pulumi config set path ../my-existing-image/build
Congratulations! You're now well on your way to managing a production-grade container service on AWS with Pulumi --- and there's lots more you can do from here:
