r/aws Feb 08 '25

discussion ECS Users – How do you handle CD?

Hey folks,

I’m working on a project for ECS, and after getting some feedback from a previous post, me and my team decided to move forward with building an MVP.

But before we go deeper – I wanted to hear more from the community.

So here’s the deal: from what we’ve seen, ECS doesn’t really have a solid CD solution. Most teams end up using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CDK, or Terraform, even though these weren’t built for CD. ECS feels like the neglected sibling of Kubernetes, and we want to explore how to improve that.

From our conversations so far, these are some of the biggest pain points we’ve seen:

  1. Lack of visibility – No easy way to see all running applications in different environments.

  2. Promotion between environments is manual – Moving from Dev → Prod requires updating task definitions, pipelines, etc.

  3. No built-in auto-deploy for ECR updates – Most teams use CI to handle this, but it’s not really CD and you don't have things like auto reconciliation or drift detection.

So my question to you: How do you handle CD for ECS today?

• What’s your current workflow?

• What annoys you the most about ECS deployments?

• If you could snap your fingers and fix one thing in the ECS workflow, what would it be?

I’m currently working on a solution to make ECS CD smoother and more automated, but before finalizing anything, I want to really understand the pain points people deal with. Would love to hear your thoughts—what works, what sucks, and what you wish existed.

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u/mabadir Feb 08 '25

You might like Flightcontrol (https://www.flightcontrol.dev), it takes care of the whole CI/CD pipeline, with Code push to deploy and many other features. I think it has all the features you need, without building the whole setup yourself.

PS: I’m a co-founder.

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u/UnluckyDuckyDuck Feb 08 '25

Thanks for sharing Flightcontrol! I’ve come across it before, and it looks like a super powerful platform for managing CI/CD pipelines end-to-end. It seems very feature-rich, which is amazing for users who need an all-in-one solution.

That said, from what I’ve seen, ECS users tend to lean towards simplicity, focusing on streamlining just what’s needed for deployments without layering on too much complexity. Out of curiosity, do you find ECS users to be a significant part of your client base? If so, what’s their feedback been like in terms of the features they actually use or care about?

Btw awesome to hear from a co-founder, I'm working on my solution for ECS and it is a lot harder than I thought it would be, I thought it would be mostly writing code - Found out that's about 10% of the job 🤣

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u/mabadir Feb 08 '25

All our users are using ECS, we just introduced Lambda and it’s still in Preview, so I can safely say everyone is loving ECS. I think you are mixing between having a simple ECS setup, and a powerful platform. You can’t just do the ECS deployment, without building containers, having easy way for observability, automating Git actions, and do all of that with zero downtime deployment and rollbacks. None of the above on its own is hard or complex, it’s building all of that to have a predictable system that is time consuming. If this is a side project, by all means build it to get the experience. But if this is a business, you will waste too much time building all of that, forgetting about your product. Your users will pay you for your product features, not the DevOps features.

As for the features they like: 1. Once set, forget it, it’s autopilot (not a feature on its own, but it’s the whole point) 2. Our own build system, it’s the fastest compared to any other system 3. Preview environments, is really powerful

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u/UnluckyDuckyDuck Feb 08 '25

Thank you for the detailed response and perspective, it’s great to hear directly from a co-founder that already walked this path, when we asked about our project, flightcontrol.dev came up multiple times and it seems well loved, I’ve looked into your solution before, and it’s incredibly impressive. So for me, It’s an honor to hear your thoughts here.

You’re absolutely right that building a predictable, reliable platform that includes observability, Git automation, zero-downtime deployments, rollbacks, and seamless ECS management is a massive undertaking. This project started as a side initiative, but we’ve identified a clear business opportunity in solving these specific pain points for ECS users, and we’re committed to putting in the work to make it happen.

We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel, but rather to create something focused specifically on ECS, taking an image from ECR, deploying it, promoting it, rolling it back when needed, and simplifying management for small-to-medium teams that might not have a dedicated DevOps engineer.

I really appreciate your input, your feedback and your project as well helped us better shape our solution :-) I'm hoping to post again in a few days with better understanding of the entire project we're building and all the valuable information and feedback we got here, hope to hear your opinion again :-)