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[Book Review] "AWS Container Design and Construction [Full-Scale] Introduction, Expanded and Revised Edition" - A Recommended Book for Those Who Want to Know About the Latest ECS Environment in 2026
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Hello, I'm Tsukuboshi (tsukuboshi0755)!
I recently finished reading the newly published "AWS Container Design and Construction [Serious] Introduction, Expanded and Revised Edition," and I'd like to introduce it as an excellent book for building an ECS infrastructure in 2026!
I should note that I read this expanded and revised edition having already read the original "AWS Container Design and Construction [Serious] Introduction."
The following book review of the original edition is also helpful, so please take a look.
In this article, I'll mainly touch on the differences between the original and the expanded and revised edition while introducing the recommended highlights of the expanded and revised edition!
Book Information
- Release date: January 30, 2026
- Authors
- Publisher: SB Creative
Changes from the Original Edition
Incorporation of ECS Updates
The original edition of this book was released in October 2021, and more than four years have passed since then until the expanded and revised edition was released in January 2026.
During that time, the following major ECS updates were announced:
- Fargate support for Graviton 2
- Announcement of ECS Service Connect
- Announcement of GuardDuty ECS Runtime Monitoring
- Ability to run task-level fault injection experiments on ECS with Fault Injection Simulator (FIS)
- Announcement of Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights with enhanced observability
- Announcement of ECS native Blue/Green deployment
- Announcement of ECS Managed Instance
Since this book thoroughly incorporates the latest ECS updates mentioned above, you can catch up on all the latest ECS updates from the past four to five years in one go.
(ECS native Blue/Green deployment in particular is a new feature separate from Blue/Green deployment via CodeDeploy, and it's a method recommended by AWS officially, so it's something worth knowing about...!)
I'd recommend this not only to those who are new to ECS, but also to those who have worked with ECS before but are not yet familiar with the updates mentioned above.
Expanded Content
Furthermore, in addition to incorporating ECS updates, the content of the book itself has been expanded.
While the original edition was 440 pages, it has apparently grown to a whopping 656 pages this time. (An increase of more than 200 pages!)
The main areas of expansion are as follows:
- Chapter 3: Basic Architecture Design
- Connection methods in online processing: "public network → ECS service," "between ECS services," and "ECS service → AWS service/public network"
- Processing methods using ECS tasks and Step Functions in batch processing
- Chapter 4: Container Design Centered on ECS/Fargate
- Troubleshooting operations in operational design
- Verification using FIS in reliability design
- Speeding up CI/CD processes with remote cache in performance design
- Utilization of Graviton-based Fargate in cost optimization design, enabling/disabling Container Insights and GuardDuty ECS Runtime Monitoring
- Chapter 5: Building AWS Container Architecture (Fundamentals)
- Aurora Serverless v2 implementation hands-on
- ECS native Blue/Green deployment implementation hands-on
- Cloud Map service discovery implementation hands-on
- Chapter 6: Building AWS Container Architecture (Practical)
- Distributed tracing with X-Ray implementation hands-on
- ECS Service Connect inter-service connection method implementation hands-on
- ECS Runtime Monitoring with GuardDuty implementation hands-on
- Fault testing environment with FIS implementation hands-on
- Batch processing with Step Functions implementation hands-on
- Overall renewal and expansion of icons/diagrams/references/columns, etc.
In addition to the above, numerous minor revisions have been made to align with the latest 2026 ECS configurations, and it's clear that many aspects have been revised compared to the original edition.
I had been learning key ECS points since the original edition, but reading the expanded and revised edition allowed me to further upgrade my surrounding knowledge of ECS environments!
Even if you've already read the original edition like I have, I recommend the expanded and revised edition as you'll discover many new things.
Renewed Console UI
Although it's a subtle change, one thing I was personally pleased about was the renewal of the console UI used in the hands-on sections.
This is because a major overhaul of the ECS console screen took place in January 2023 after the original edition was released, and by the time I was reading the original edition, the console screen had already changed to the new UI.
Due to the above, when following the hands-on sections in the original edition, I had to search one by one for where the buttons corresponding to the old UI were located in the new UI, which made some parts difficult to follow.
This time, it naturally corresponds to the new UI, so as long as AWS doesn't make any major UI changes going forward, you should be able to try the hands-on sections with peace of mind.
What Hasn't Changed from the Original Edition
While I've touched on the differences between the original and the expanded and revised edition so far, on the other hand, I came away with the same impression I had when I read the original edition.
That is that this book is one that allows you to acquire practical-level knowledge necessary for building and operating container environments in production.
AWS has been publishing the Well-Architected Framework, a collection of best practices for designing and operating systems in the cloud, based on more than 10 years of experience.
This book basically follows the five pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization to explain key points for designing AWS container environments centered on ECS, and then walks you through building an AWS environment based on those points in a hands-on format.
In other words, just by reading this book, you can acquire the know-how to build and operate a production-level ECS container architecture based on the Well-Architected Framework recommended by AWS.
The content is extremely convincing, so personally, if someone asks me for a recommended resource on ECS, this is still the book I would recommend without hesitation.
If there's anyone who is new to ECS and hasn't come across this book yet, I think it's worth reading.
In Closing
This time I introduced the "AWS Container Design and Construction [Serious] Introduction, Expanded and Revised Edition."
It was already an excellent book in its original edition, but the expanded and revised edition incorporates many of the latest ECS updates and content expansions, and I felt it has been further powered up into practical content aligned with the current state of 2026.
This is a book I can recommend to a wide variety of people — those who are seriously considering container development and operations with ECS going forward, those who have worked with ECS before but haven't touched it in a while, and those who have read the original edition but haven't yet read the expanded and revised edition.
I hope you'll pick it up and give it a read!
That's all from Tsukuboshi (tsukuboshi0755)!
