I've deployed on everything. EC2 with custom AMIs. EKS. Bare instances. Dell Racks in the closet (this was a pain but needed at Energy Exemplar). Managed Instances. Heroku. DigitalOcean. Google Cloud got heavy at Betterleap where we spun up services constantly. Azure and I have met but we're not close.
I converted to AWS in 2012. Biased. Acknowledged. Moving on.
Five years ago I went all in on ECS and haven't looked back. I had dabbled with it sometime in 2017 (I think, or around that time).
The goal was simple. I wanted container orchestration that scales horizontally and vertically without adopting Kubernetes as a dependency. Kubernetes is powerful and something I genuinely enjoyed using across multiple companies, platforms, and industries. It's also a lifestyle choice. I wanted the capabilities without the commitment.
ECS gave me that.
I can spin up an API gateway with ACL and sidecars. I can build multiple clusters and wire them together using service discovery. I get the orchestration patterns I need without managing the orchestration layer itself.
That's the point people miss. ECS isn't a lesser Kubernetes. It's a different answer to a different question. The question being: what if I want containers at scale and also want to ship product this quarter?
Kubernetes makes sense when you need it. Multi-cloud portability. Extremely custom scheduling. Massive engineering teams who can dedicate headcount to platform work. That's real. That's valid.
But most teams don't need it. They need containers that deploy, scale, and stay up. ECS does that without asking you to become an expert in something adjacent to your actual product.
I don't see the need to use anything else. Not because ECS is perfect. Because it's sufficient. And sufficient ships.
Honda Civics in a world of super cars, buses, tractors, and more. They last over 200k miles, are cheap to maintain, and incredible.
❤️
Jake