aws-containers

An agent skill by aws, from aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws. Tags: cloud, containers, devops, kubernetes, troubleshooting.

What it does

Builds and deploys containerized workloads on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Fargate, and ECR (Elastic Container Registry). Covers general EKS knowledge, Karpenter, AWS Load Balancer Controller and leveraging various open source Kubernetes projects with EKS. Covers general ECS knowledge, task definitions, Fargate services, ECS Exec, ECS Express Mode and ECS Managed Instances. Covers general Elastic Beanstalk knowledge, Elastic Beanstalk configuration and platforms supported by Elastic Beanstalk. Covers general ECR knowledge, ECR repository setup and lifecycle policies. Includes recommending, enabling, and reading Amazon ECS Action Logs to troubleshoot control-plane failures (deployment rollback/circuit-breaker, task placement, scaling, task replacement). Applies when deploying, debugging, or optimizing containers on AWS. Should be used instead of relying on internal knowledge for these services.

Install

With the skills CLI, which installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents:

npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill aws-containers

Or copy the skill folder into Claude Code's skills directory by hand (~/.claude/skills for every project, or .claude/skills inside one):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws
cp -r agent-toolkit-for-aws/plugins/aws-core/skills/aws-containers ~/.claude/skills/aws-containers

Safety box score

Grade C, moderate risk: 42 of 100 risk points, rated 2026-10-15. The grade rates what the skill and its scripts can reach on the machine of whoever installs it, across eight categories from shell execution to secrets access. How the score works.

This skill is an AWS container operations guide: it can lead an agent to create and modify ECR, ECS, EKS, and Elastic Beanstalk resources, install controllers, and enable ECS Action Logs. The main risks are broad account/cluster changes, remote artifact downloads, and handling of auth tokens and secret-injection patterns; it does not ship executable scripts or obvious prompt-injection payloads.

Category levels, from 0 (none) to 3 (high)
Category	Level	Why
Code & shell execution	0 (none)	The shipped files are markdown guidance only; they contain shell/AWS CLI examples but no native scripts or evaluable code.
Network access	2 (moderate)	It directs the agent to call AWS and GitHub over the network, including `curl -O "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/.../iam_policy.json"` and `gh api repos/.../releases/latest`, which fetch remote content and send account/cluster data to AWS APIs.
Filesystem reach	0 (none)	There are no commands to edit or delete user files outside the project; the only file access described is reading the skill's own markdown references.
Secrets & credentials	2 (moderate)	The docs explicitly handle auth and secret material via `aws ecr get-login-password \| docker login --password-stdin ...`, ECS `secretsmanager:GetSecretValue`/`ssm:GetParameters`, and Beanstalk `application:environmentsecrets`.
Privilege & persistence	2 (moderate)	The skill includes account- and cluster-level privilege changes such as `aws iam create-policy`, `eksctl create podidentityassociation`, and EKS/ECS add-on and nodegroup management.
Instruction hijack surface	0 (none)	No hidden instructions, instruction-skipping, or prompt-injection payloads are present; the confirmation language in `action-logs.md` is a safeguard, not a bypass.
Irreversible actions	3 (high)	Its purpose is to deploy and operate container infrastructure, and the examples include mutating actions like `aws ecr create-repository`, `aws eks create-nodegroup`, `helm install aws-load-balancer-controller`, and `aws logs create-delivery`.
Transparency	1 (low)	Some install guidance relies on floating remote references such as `releases/latest` and `${TAG}`-based raw GitHub URLs, so the exact content can change outside the repo.

Before installing

Review whether you are comfortable granting the agent rights to create/update ECR, EKS, ECS, IAM, and CloudWatch Logs resources.
If you plan to use the load balancer controller install path, pin a specific release and inspect the downloaded IAM policy JSON before running it.
Test once in a nonproduction AWS account with least-privilege credentials and no long-lived secrets loaded into the shell environment.

Rated 2026-10-15 by an automated review of 16 files from the skill's repository.

Source

Repository: aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws (all skills from this repository)
Path: plugins/aws-core/skills/aws-containers/SKILL.md
Branch: main
Collection: aws-core
Updated: 2026-09-19

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