Elastic Container Service (ECS): My default choice for containers on AWS

Amazon Elastic Container Service is the default AWS service I reach for whenever I need to run containers. Whether it's a batch processing pipeline that fans out across hundreds of Fargate tasks or a FastAPI backend sitting behind an Application Load Balancer, ECS handles the orchestration without the operational complexity of Kubernetes. The control plane is free, the AWS integration is deep, and as of early 2026, the deployment capabilities rival anything in the container ecosystem. I recently presented on ECS and decided to write down the things I have learned from building real projects into one place. This blog post is the companion to that presentation - a deep dive into what ECS offers, how I use it, and how you can start building with it today. Why Containers? Before we talk about ECS specifically, let's talk about why containers matter. Four core principles make containers compelling: Consistency - The same image runs identically on your laptop, in CI, and in production. No mo