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Blog post for Rails 7 ECS Auto DevOps

Chad Woolley requested to merge caw-blog-ecs-auto-devops into master

Why is this change being made?

I initially wanted to share my experience learning how to do this, especially since the existing main Auto DevOps docs (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/) are confusing in many ways. For example

  • The ECS stuff is mixed in with the K8s stuff so it's hard to know what applies to ECS and what doesn't
  • Many things that are important about the ECS flow are not mentioned
  • Some basic things are not mentioned at all, or at least not prominently enough in the overview (e.g. that the whole point of Auto DevOps is that you don't need a .gitlab-ci.yml at all, but you can override it if needed).

However, I was then referred on slack to the following quick start guide, which is informative, and duplicates a lot of what I was planning to write: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/cloud_deployment/ecs/quick_start_guide.html

Unfortunately, none of the main Auto DevOps docs link to this guide, so I never knew about it until someone told me, so I wasted a lot of time figuring out stuff on my own that was covered in that guide.

So I want to put this on hold until I have a discussion with the docs team about possible improvements, which may eliminate the need for this blog post if it's eventually well-covered in the official docs.

See also this slack thread from my standup post where I discuss some other related problems with the docs, such as the existing guide rotting a bit. E.g. the fact that the "New" AWS ECS UI does not match the guide screenshots, and more concerning, does not even support some of the things from the old UI that are critical to Auto DevOps setup. So we should call out to people to make sure to use the old UI.

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Edited by Chad Woolley

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