Part-III WhatsApp Business API deploy on AWS ECS in an unsupported region

3 min readJan 4, 2023

Before You Start

You will need:

To set up an AWS Account ID
To create an AWS Key Pair
To subscribe to a CentOS 7 Image
To deploy in a supported region

Set up an AWS Account ID

You need to set up a valid AWS account and be familiar with working on AWS. WhatsApp provides CloudFormation templates for deploying the WhatsApp Business API client easily. Refer to the AWS Getting Started Resource Center for more information.

Create an AWS Key Pair

You need to create a new key pair to access the EC2 instance created by the WhatsApp Business API template. You can also use a previously created key pair. Refer to the Amazon EC2 Key Pairs documentation for information about creating and using key pairs with an EC2 instance.

The key pair needs to be created using the region for which you are deploying the WhatsApp Business API.

Subscribe to a CentOS 7 Image

The WhatsApp Business API client makes use of a CentOS 7 image (available in the AWS Marketplace). Terms and conditions should be reviewed and accepted before using the template. Failure to accept the terms will lead to the template creation failure.

To review and accept the CentOS 7 AMI image:

Go to the AWS Marketplace: CentOS 7 (x86_64) — with Updates HVM page.
Click Continue to Subscribe in the upper right corner, then click the Accept Terms button.

Accepting the CentOS terms

Supported Regions

The WhatsApp Business API templates use the EFS resource type, which is not available in all AWS regions. Hence, only the following regions are currently supported:

Sydney (ap-southeast-2)
Ireland (eu-west-1)
Frankfurt (eu-central-1)
N. Virginia (us-east-1)
Ohio (us-east-2)
Oregon (us-west-2)
N. California (us-west-1)
Seoul (ap-northeast-2)
Singapore (ap-southeast-1)
Tokyo (ap-northeast-1)

Depending on initial testing, WhatsApp will determine whether we can provide an alternate option that is available in all regions.

We followed this document link to deploy WhatsApp Business API on AWS the region on aws was ap-south-1(Mumbai)
this region was not supported in the given document by (Facebook) meta developers the cloud formation stack takes approx 35- 40 minutes to get deployed
As per the documents, the networking VPC part deployed as expected

Mainly we faced the issue of autoscaling group

please find this code

change the <samplebucket> with your bucket_name
WhatsApp Enterprise client (container) version linkhttps://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/on-premises/changelog/
Copy these files to your S3 bucket

Creating a stack on the CloudFormation console is an easy, wizard-driven process that consists of the following steps:

After creating a stack, you can monitor the stack’s progress, view the stack’s resources and outputs, update the stack, and delete it. Information about these actions is provided in their associated topics.

Starting the Create Stack wizard

To create a stack on the CloudFormation console

Open the AWS CloudFormation console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation.
Create a new stack by using one of the following options:

Choose Create Stack on the Stacks page. This option is visible only if you have no running stacks.
Choose Create Stack. This is the only option if you have a currently running stack.