Migrate EC2 to ECS Express Mode with Kiro CLI

Why this matters now: Migrations are exactly the toil agents should absorb. This walkthrough uses Kiro CLI with MCP servers to move an EC2 workload onto ECS Express Mode, with the agent doing discovery and generation while you review the steps. If the protocol part is still fuzzy, start with the MCP explainer; this post shows what the plumbing buys you in practice.

Three takeaways:

ECS Express Mode shrinks the target. It simplifies the workload definition and orchestrates the supporting services itself, load balancer and auto scaling included. A smaller deployment surface is a big part of why an agent can drive this migration end to end.
The MCP servers give the agent real context about your environment, which separates a guided migration from generated guesswork. The AWS server provides authenticated access to the account and the ECS server covers containerization, ECR and the ECS lifecycle. From one prompt, Kiro inspects the app, writes the Dockerfile, tests the container locally, pushes the image to ECR, creates the IAM roles, deploys to Express Mode and validates service health. AWS pitches the flow as near zero configuration with validation and rollback built in; verify those claims against your own workload.
The demo stack is realistic. The starting point is a CDK-deployed Node.js application with a load balancer, Cognito, S3 and DynamoDB, and the walkthrough ends with proper cleanup of the legacy stack. The prerequisites are ordinary: Kiro CLI, the AWS CLI, Docker and CDK, plus two MCP server entries in an mcp.json file. You still approve each step along the way, the same trust model that makes Claude Code work on infrastructure code.

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Who should read it: teams still running container-shaped workloads on EC2, anyone planning a bigger move into AWS, and anyone curious what agentic migration looks like in practice.