In the post, I will show you how to build a Linux container in Visual Studio running on a EC2 Windows Instance. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio allows you to deploy your project to Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate and recently as a container image to AWS Lambda among other options. In both of these cases, you must build a Linux container from Visual Studio or the dotnet command line.

Cloud-Init is a set of Python scripts used to configure Linux instances when they boot in AWS. Cloud-Init is included on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux AMIs. You can think of a Cloud Init script as a bare-bones Configuration Management solution like Chef or Puppet. A Cloud-Init script is passed as user data. If you have ever passed a shell script as user data, it was Cloud-Init that queried the meta-data service and executed the script.