Right, that's what I mean -- I use the web ui the first time to get the feel for the service (in this case EC2), then try to make it permanent with CloudFormati

Right, that's what I mean -- I use the web ui the first time to get the feel for the service (in this case EC2), then try to make it permanent with CloudFormation, prompting a deep dive into the reams of documentation and CloudFormation API docs. My problem was the amount of surprises that I came into contact with trying to write a consistently working CloudFormation for ECS. I wrote a CloudFormation config that would succeed, then I'd shut it down, then it'd fail -- that happening absolutely decimated any trust I had for the effectiveness of the orchestration of an ECS. Out of all the pieces that were being spun up/down, the ECS Service was the shakiest/hardest to model in my own mind -- every time I got an error from it it would make me scratch my head, even looking at the created instance in the web UI. Maybe this is all just attributable to lack of operator knowledge, but I don't think so because at this point I know _exactly_ the EC2 objects I want to make, but after my experice with trying to set up ECS I'd rather not try again. The documentation is extensive though, so I am very thankful to AWS for that. Also, of course, all of this takes a pretty long time -- though to be fair, AWS is instantiating AMIs in this time, much harder than just spinning up a container like a kubernetes cluster would have to do.