AWS re:Invent 2025 - From code to cloud: Accelerate application development with Amazon ECS (CNS341)

Accelerating Application Development with Amazon ECS

Overview of Amazon ECS

• Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that provides the easiest way to run containerized applications on AWS
• ECS offers flexibility to run containers on EC2 instances, ECS Anywhere, or the serverless AWS Fargate
• Key benefits of ECS:
  • Fully managed control plane with no upgrades or patching required
  • Serverless Fargate option that eliminates infrastructure management
  • ECS Managed Instances for access to specific EC2 instance types
  • Native service discovery, deployment mechanisms, and observability

Challenges Faced by Development and Platform Teams

• Developers face a complex process to deploy applications, involving networking, load balancers, security, and observability
• Platform teams need to support diverse application requirements across multiple development teams and AWS accounts
• Key design principles for platform teams:
  1. Lifecycle management - owning the entire application deployment lifecycle
  2. Economies of scale - reusing and sharing resources efficiently
  3. Brake glass procedures - providing flexibility and escape hatches

ECS Express Mode: Simplifying Application Deployment

• ECS Express Mode is a new feature that abstracts away the complexity of deploying containerized applications
• Developers only need to provide the container image and two IAM roles, and Express Mode provisions all necessary resources
  • This includes load balancers, auto-scaling, TLS certificates, observability, and more
• Express Mode provides a simplified CLI and console experience with visibility into the underlying resources
• Supports composition - developers can customize the underlying resources if needed
• Automatically scales and shares load balancers across multiple Express Mode services

GoDaddy's Decentralized Developer Platform on ECS

• GoDaddy built a centralized platform called "Katana" on top of ECS to serve over 2,000 engineers
• Key features of Katana:
  • Unified observability dashboard across multiple AWS accounts and services
  • Secure agent-based access to manage resources in each account
  • Automated deployment patterns like blue/green and canary releases
  • Extensibility options to allow developers to customize as needed
• Chose ECS Fargate for the benefits of managed compute without sacrificing flexibility
• Lessons learned:
  • Importance of a single pane of glass for developers
  • Challenges of using CloudFormation for dynamic ECS deployments
  • Need to partner across teams (observability, security, governance)
  • Supporting a wide spectrum of developer expertise levels

Key Takeaways

• ECS Express Mode dramatically simplifies the process of deploying containerized applications on AWS
• Platform teams can leverage ECS to build centralized developer platforms that accelerate application delivery
• Providing the right balance of abstraction and customization is crucial for meeting diverse developer needs
• ECS offers a robust set of features and managed services to streamline container orchestration at scale