AWS App Runner
Fully managed service that runs containerized web apps and APIs directly from source code or a container image — no infrastructure to manage.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-28
Key facts
- 01Point it at a GitHub repo or ECR image — App Runner builds, deploys, load balances, and serves over HTTPS automatically
- 02Auto scales on concurrent requests per instance; scales down to provisioned (idle) instances, not to zero
- 03VPC connector lets the app reach private resources like RDS; the app itself is internet-facing by default
- 04Built-in TLS and load balancing — no ALB to configure or pay for
- 05Reality check: closed to new customers since April 2026, no new features planned — AWS now points new workloads to ECS Express Mode. Exams still test it as the 'easiest container deployment' answer
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Containerized web app with no infrastructure or orchestration experience" → App Runner
- "Deploy straight from source code repository" with automatic build pipeline → App Runner
- "Simplest / fastest way to get a container serving HTTPS traffic" → App Runner
- Team has no ECS, EKS, or networking knowledge and just needs a web service running → App Runner
Not this service
- Full control over orchestration, networking, or task placement → ECS or EKS
- Event-driven, short-lived functions → Lambda
- Background workers or non-HTTP workloads → ECS on Fargate (App Runner only serves web traffic)
- Static site or frontend hosting → Amplify or S3 + CloudFront
Use cases
- 01A two-person startup ships a Node.js API from GitHub to a live HTTPS endpoint in minutes — no Dockerfile-to-production pipeline to build, no cluster to babysit
- 02Internal tools and admin dashboards where paying an engineer to manage ECS would cost more than the app earns
- 03Prototypes and MVPs that need a real production URL today and can migrate to ECS later if they grow
- 04Microservice APIs behind a VPC connector talking to a private RDS instance, without anyone touching subnets or security groups directly
How it's charged
- 01Two billing states: provisioned (idle) instances are billed on memory only; active instances are billed on vCPU + memory while processing requests
- 02Not scale-to-zero — an idle service still pays for provisioned memory around the clock, which is the classic App Runner billing surprise
- 03Flat monthly fee per app for automatic deployments; source-code deployments add a per-minute build fee
- 04Billed per second, with a one-minute vCPU minimum each time an instance goes active
- 05No separate load balancer charge — the ALB you'd pay for on ECS is baked in, which flips the cost comparison for small apps
