Lightweight deployment pipelines for containerized services on AWS: a new approach to eliminating configuration drift in high-velocity development environments

Introduction. A fundamental tension in the modern DevOps practice is between deployment velocity and infrastructure consistency. Configuration drift—that is, the divergence between the state declared in code and the actual configuration of cloud resources—represents an absolutely critical challenge for teams who manage Infrastructure as Code. Materials and methods. The present paper proposes a minimal, high-velocity deployment pipeline for Amazon ECS, implemented via GitHub Actions and leveraging the new track_latest attribute in the Terraform AWS provider. Results and discussion. Unlike the conventional, heavier terraform plan + terraform apply workflow, the proposed scheme emphasizes low latency and minimal operational complexity: Terraform remains the source of truth for core infrastructure, while frequent image updates are delegated to a lightweight CI/CD pipeline, thereby enabling near-instantaneous releases without cumbersome procedures. This approach is particularly well-suited to experimental environments, MVPs, and early-stage product development, where rapid iteration, process simplicity, and deterministic reproducibility of changes are paramount. The main methodological benefits of this approach are by way of formally specifying the infrastructure's final state consistency to ensure deterministic reproducibility of configurations while materially reducing both cognitive and operational load on deployment teams. Also, the setup boosts visibility with solid native hookups to bug trackers and company chat tools, allowing for the gathering of telemetry data linking deployment happenings to lifecycle items and quick spotting of any off-track moments. Conclusion. This gives a real-world mix between speed of release and steadiness of setup, making the method a strong tool for DevOps/SRE workers, platform and product groups, cloud planners, and tech leads wanting to cut drift and linked running dangers in AWS.

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