I love AWS and their pace of innovation, but some areas are really lagging behind.
Two new container services announced but São Paulo still doesn't even have ECS which was announced in 2014.
Two new container services announced but São Paulo still doesn't even have ECS which was announced in 2014.
ECS has been on death's doorstep while AWS has been pushing the Lambda strategy. My guess is that their numbers show a slowdown in Lambda uptake due to the problems with Lambda, so they're now moving over to this Fargate platform and ECS is getting a few dribbles of dev time as a consequence.
I think they need to get over this NIH/Rebrand&Relabel syndrome and implement Istio (https://istio.io/).
First of all you are using the wrong measurement of growth vs stagnation. We've continually been releasing features (not all of which are part of ecs-agent), while also working on many interesting backend projects such as Fargate. Much of what we develop is closed source or open sourced later, so the ecs-agent repo is not a good measurement of progress or attention.
Second the idea that ECS is on death's doorstep is just false. In the container state of the union at re:Invent Anthony Suarez, head of engineering on ECS, shared that ECS has experienced 450% growth, with millions of container instances under management, and hundreds of millions launched per week: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DP1sWVZUMAAflSW.jpg
This matches up with my personal experience as a developer advocate for ECS talking to customers pretty much every day who are considering ECS or moving to ECS because it makes it easier to connect your containers to other AWS services.
Take a look at any random Github project that's unmaintained. That's the image Amazon has been showing the development community when they look at ECS. They don't see the closed source work. They don't see the hundreds of millions of internal KPIs ticked per week.
Now, I haven't spoken with a developer advocate, but I'm happy to share some of my frustration with you: I've had a dedicated resource working around bugs and limitations in ECS for months. We built a service mesh because ECS lacks service discovery, and then we built wonky patches to work around weird bugs in ecs-agent regarding how containers identify themselves. We've spent serious, deep time tracking down intermittent failures in the scheduler. We've worked in and around the strange task abstraction. This hasn't been a lovely experience. It's been hard and painful, but we press onward only due to the lack of time to convert to Kubernetes/Istio.
Are you in Seattle? Shoot me an email; I'd be happy to grab a coffee and share our experience.