App Runner

You have a web service in a container (or a supported source repo) and you want it online — with HTTPS, a load balancer, autoscaling, health checks, and rolling deploys — without touching ECS, Fargate task definitions, ALBs, or VPC wiring. AWS App Runner is that: connect an ECR image or a GitHub/Bitbucket repo, set the port and a few env vars, and App Runner builds it (for source repos), runs it on managed compute, fronts it with a load balancer and a TLS endpoint, autoscales on concurrent requests, and redeploys automatically when the image or branch changes.

• An App Runner service is Regional; AWS runs its instances across multiple AZs transparently — you don’t pick subnets or AZs for the service itself.
• By default the service reaches the internet for outbound calls. A VPC connector attaches outbound traffic to your VPC subnets/AZs so it can reach RDS, ElastiCache, or internal services privately.
• The public endpoint is a stable *.awsapprunner.com URL; add a custom domain with an AWS-managed certificate.

graph LR
SRC1["ECR image"] --> AR
SRC2["Source repo (GitHub / Bitbucket)"] -->|"App Runner builds"| AR
subgraph AR_BOX["App Runner service (managed, multi-AZ)"]
  AR["Build - deploy - TLS - load balance - autoscale (to zero)"]
end
AR -->|"HTTPS *.awsapprunner.com"| USERS(("Users"))
AR -.->|"VPC connector"| VPC["Your VPC (RDS, cache, internal APIs)"]
classDef ar fill:#f3ecfb,stroke:#8b3de0,stroke-width:2px,color:#3a1a5c
class AR ar

You pay for provisioned memory whenever an instance exists (kept warm), and compute (vCPU) only while requests are being served — when idle, App Runner scales the active instances down (optionally to zero warm-but-not-billed-for-CPU), so a low-traffic service is cheap. Source-based deploys add a small build fee. There’s no ALB line item — it’s bundled. More expensive per unit than raw Fargate at steady high load, cheaper in ops time and for spiky traffic.

• Trigger phrases: “deploy a containerized web app / API with the least operational overhead,” “automatic HTTPS and scaling,” “don’t want to manage load balancers or clusters,” “scale to zero between requests.”
• App Runner vs Fargate/ECS: App Runner is opinionated and hands-off (HTTP request/response services only); ECS/EKS give you networking, sidecars, non-HTTP protocols, and fine-grained control.
• App Runner vs Lambda: Lambda for event-driven, very spiky, sub-second tasks and pay-per-invocation; App Runner for always-available HTTP services that want a container and a persistent process model.
• Needs a VPC connector to reach private resources — by default it can’t see your VPC.
• Supports automatic deployments on ECR push or repo commit, plus manual deployments; health check path is configurable.