multi-env-deploy VS terraform-aws-components

I have used CodePipeline/CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodeCommit quite a bit. You can see an example of it all working together with Terraform here: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy

Parameter Store is a good place to store things. ECS can read from it and set variables. This is a complete example of using Terraform to manage infrastructure with EC2 or ECS: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy Here is an app that runs in ECS: https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example This task file sets env vars based on parameter store: https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example/blob/master/ecs/taskdef.json

AWS has a fine stack for deploying "cloud native" apps on top of EC2 instances.

Build a base AMI using Packer and launch it to an Auto Scaling Group behind a load balancer. Deploy code to the ASG using CodeDeploy. Use RDS for the database.

This is a good match for languages that have good concurrency like Elixir. They benefit from deploying to big machines that have a lot of CPU cores, and keeping a common in-memory cache on the EC2 instance is more efficient than using an external cache like Elasticache. It also works well for resource-hungry systems with poor concurrency like Ruby on Rails. Putting these kinds of apps into big containers is just a waste of money.

Here is a complete example of that architecture using Terraform: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy

Similarly, bare metal can be really cost-effective. For $115/month, I can get a dedicated server with 24 VCPU cores (2x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5-2620 CPU), 64 GB RAM, 4x8 TB SATA, 30 TB traffic (see https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL). That would be an order of magnitude more expensive on AWS with containers.

Here is how I did it with Terraform: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy/blob/master/terraform/modules/iam-codepipeline-app/main.tf

The AWS components are managed via Terraform: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy

A fully featured infrastructure using terraform with terragrunt can be found in this repo: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy/tree/master/terraform

You might like this full-featured example of using Terraform to set up the infrastructure for an application using EC2 instances in an autoscaling group or ECS containers. https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy

Here is a set of hand-coded modules I wrote that handle deploying real world complex apps to AWS: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy

The solution to your problem is to build smaller "root" modules that do one thing well. Here's how we do it: https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-aws-components/tree/main/modules; we call ours "components". For example, we have hundreds.

Cloudposse has great examples for AWS https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-aws-components

You can also check some open source modules. Cloudposse https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-aws-components has plenty of them that are really good imho.