From Learning to Shipping — Docker, Graceful Shutdown & ECS Fargate

From Learning to Shipping — Docker, Graceful Shutdown & ECS Fargate

This is the final post in the series. In part 6 I covered testing — table-driven tests, httptest, benchmarks. Now I'm taking everything built across the last six posts and shipping it: a multi-stage Docker build, graceful shutdown wired into the Gin server, and deployment to AWS ECS Fargate using Terraform — the same stack I used for rust-ai-gateway.

If you've followed along, this is where the learning project becomes something you can actually point a recruiter at.

Multi-Stage Docker Build

The biggest Go deployment win over the JVM is binary size. A Go service compiles to a single self-contained binary with no runtime dependency — no JVM to install, no classpath to assemble. That means the production image can be built in two stages: a full Go toolchain image to compile, then a minimal scratch or distroless image to run.