Leveraging ECS to Optimize Your Platform Strategy

Key Takeaways

1. Spectrum of Platform Patterns:

   • Account as a Service: Developers have full autonomy and flexibility, but less standardization.
   • Platform as a Service: Developers focus on business logic, platform team manages the infrastructure.
   • Cluster as a Service: Platform team provides pre-configured clusters, developers manage services and tasks.
   • Template as a Service: Platform team provides infrastructure-as-code templates, developers consume and customize them.

2. Benefits of ECS:

   • Managed control plane, deep integration with other AWS services.
   • Security features like IAM, Guard Duty, VPC Flow Logs.
   • Serverless compute with AWS Fargate.
   • Scalability and high-performance for critical workloads.

3. Fanny May's Journey:

   • Transformed legacy loan accounting system using ECS and other AWS services.
   • Enabled self-service and increased developer productivity through an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
   • Achieved 65% faster processing, 33% lower costs, and improved security and governance.

Platform Patterns and ECS

Account as a Service

• Developers have full autonomy and flexibility, but less standardization.
• Supports a wide range of workload types, with full isolation between teams.
• Developers take on cognitive load for troubleshooting and standardization.

Platform as a Service

• Developers focus on building business logic, platform team manages the infrastructure.
• Reduces cognitive load for developers, but may be restrictive for certain workload types.
• Platform team needs to build and operate the platform, which can be a burden.

Cluster as a Service

• Platform team provides pre-configured clusters, developers manage services and tasks.
• Developers have autonomy over their applications, with reduced cognitive load.
• Shared responsibility model between platform and developers for certain aspects (e.g., load balancing, security).

Template as a Service

• Platform team provides infrastructure-as-code templates, developers consume and customize them.
• Developers can get started quickly, platform team can scale by providing reusable templates.
• Developers are still exposed to infrastructure, but can have Escape hatches for customization.

Fanny May's ECS Journey

• Transformed legacy loan accounting system using ECS and other AWS services.
• Leveraged ECS template as a service pattern, with a custom low-code platform.
• Enabled self-service and increased developer productivity through an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
• Achieved 65% faster processing, 33% lower costs, and improved security and governance.
• Emphasized the importance of developer experience and "Dev Joy" in the platform design.

Additional Resources

• Backstage - Open Source Internal Developer Portal
• Harmonics on AWS - Backstage Reference Implementation
• AWS ECS Documentation