Title
AWS re:Invent 2022 - What's new and what's next with Amazon ECS (CON210)
Summary
- Nick Colt, General Manager of Amazon ECS, and Akhilesh Reddy, VP at Goldman Sachs, presented at AWS re:Invent 2022.
- ECS is a serverless container orchestrator with a serverless control plane, meaning no servers to set up or manage.
- ECS can run containers on various compute infrastructures, including AWS Fargate (serverless compute engine), EC2 instances, and on-premises hardware.
- Fargate is popular due to its simplicity, security, and cost savings, offering a serverless end-to-end experience.
- ECS Anywhere allows containers to run on customer-owned hardware, orchestrated by the ECS control plane in the cloud.
- ECS is chosen for faster time to market, lower costs, and built-in security.
- ECS scales massively, with 2.25 billion task launches per week worldwide.
- Security enhancements include IAM integration, compliance certifications, and unique data plane isolation in Fargate.
- New features include ECS Service Connect, larger task sizes on Fargate, and improved console workflows.
- ECS Blueprints, CDK extensions, and the AWS Copilot CLI provide application-first interfaces.
- Akhilesh Reddy shared Goldman Sachs' journey with ECS Fargate, highlighting accelerated go-to-market, reduced operational overhead, and enhanced security posture.
- Goldman Sachs' design choices included a centralized network hub, VPC sharing, and IAM segmentation for improved developer agility and security.
- A custom portal was created for cross-account visualization of ECS services.
- Upcoming ECS features focus on developer experience, application-first approach, and performance, including native blue-green and canary deployments, faster scaling, and storage options.
- ECS has a public roadmap on GitHub and a YouTube channel for community engagement.
Insights
- ECS's serverless control plane and Fargate's serverless compute engine significantly reduce management overhead, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to streamline operations.
- The ability to run containers on-premises with ECS Anywhere is particularly useful for data-sensitive applications that cannot leave a specific location, such as medical records processing.
- ECS's scalability and performance improvements are ongoing, with a focus on increasing task launch rates and reducing latency, which directly impacts developer productivity.
- The introduction of ECS Service Connect simplifies service mesh benefits, indicating AWS's commitment to simplifying complex networking tasks for developers.
- Goldman Sachs' experience with ECS Fargate demonstrates the enterprise-level adoption and trust in AWS services for critical financial workloads, emphasizing ECS's robust security and compliance features.
- The custom portal developed by Goldman Sachs for ECS services visualization underscores the flexibility of ECS's API and the potential for customized solutions when out-of-the-box features are insufficient.
- The upcoming ECS features, such as native blue-green and canary deployments, indicate a strong focus on improving the developer experience and operational efficiency, which are key factors in modern application development and deployment.
- ECS's public roadmap and developer advocacy team's engagement with the community through GitHub and YouTube channels show AWS's commitment to transparency and customer feedback in product development.