Stop Fighting AWS Networking — Deploy Your Container in 3 Steps

You Just Want to Deploy a Docker Container. AWS Has Other Plans. You've got a Dockerfile. It works on your machine. It works in CI. You just want to put it on the internet. So you open the AWS console and within 15 minutes you're reading about: VPCs, CIDR blocks, and subnet math Internet Gateways vs. NAT Gateways Route tables (public vs. private, and why they're different) Application Load Balancers, target groups, listener rules Security groups that reference other security groups ECS task definitions, services, execution roles, task roles Auto Scaling policies, CloudWatch alarms, Container Insights You wanted docker run. AWS handed you a 200-page networking textbook. I've been there. Multiple times. And after the third time I rebuilt this from scratch for a new project, I decided to actually do it right — and never do it again. But first, let me show you the mistake almost everyone makes on their first try. The Trap: Fargate in a Public Subnet Here's what most tutorials teach you (an