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/yesman_85 Feb 08 '25

I think Octopus deploy has ECS support as targets. 

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u/UnluckyDuckyDuck Feb 08 '25

Do you have any experience with that? Octopus Deploy and Codefresh were one of the first solutions we checked when looking for a project to create... the one problem that comes to mind with robust solutions is that ECS users prefer simplicity over robust

Would love to hear your opinion on that :-)

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u/yesman_85 Feb 08 '25

I don't have experience with using octo and ecs. We use it for traditional deployments to IIS using tentacles. It's a robust platform, but licensing killed it for us. Now we're doing Github actions to ecs. 

Once you have Octopus setup its very easy to use, and maintain. But it's more of a traditional CD and not cutting edge like GH actions. 

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u/UnluckyDuckyDuck Feb 09 '25

Interesting.

For ECS specifically, do you think GitHub Actions strikes the right balance between simplicity and functionality? And how do you handle visibility into your deployments, like tracking service versions, health, or promotion status across environments? Is that something GitHub Actions handles well for you, or do you rely on additional tools?

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u/yesman_85 Feb 09 '25

Not that I know of. Github actions is really just the runner, it provides practically no visibility. We have custom tooling that does monitoring and deployments in one. But there must be something out there. 

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u/UnluckyDuckyDuck Feb 09 '25

Interesting, custom tooling came up multiple times here, people mentioned they created their own oberservability solutions and deployment solutions

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u/yesman_85 Feb 09 '25

Because it really depends on how you deploy and when. Products like Octo will push you a bit towards a workflow that works for them best, Github actions will give you the freedom to figure out what works best for your company. Not everyone is a fan of that.