Platform engineering for ECS Fargate teams.
Guides, comparisons, and use cases. Written by engineers who've operated 100+ ECS environments in production.
ECS Task Definitions: Every Field, Common Mistakes, Best Practices
The 8 mistakes that break ECS deployments: wrong IAM role, invalid Fargate CPU/memory combos, health check restart loops, secrets that don't rotate after rotation.
How to Control CloudWatch Logs Costs on ECS?
ECS sends all logs to CloudWatch with retention set to Never Expire by default. 4 steps to cut your CloudWatch bill by 60-80% with real CLI commands and Terraform.
How to Debug AWS Fargate Containers with ECS Exec?
No more SSH into EC2. ECS Exec gives you a shell into Fargate containers. The 5 IAM errors that catch everyone, copy-paste policy, and production audit setup.
Do You Need an Internal Developer Platform for AWS ECS?
93% of top-performing teams use an IDP. But ECS teams don't need a full platform — they need an operational layer. A decision framework to figure out what you actually need.
How to Clone an ECS Environment Without Rewriting Terraform?
The compliance auditor wants a clone of production. That's 15 services, an ALB, RDS, SSM params — a 12-step manual process. Here's the template approach, and a parameterized Terraform module.
Why Can't You See Per-Environment AWS Costs?
Cost Explorer shows the total. It doesn't show per-environment costs. Here's why ECS Fargate environments are structurally hard to attribute — and a 10-line bash script that does it anyway.
How Much Do AWS Dev Environments Really Cost?
Cost Explorer shows the total. It doesn't show per-environment costs. Here's the real math: compute + fixed overhead (ALB, NAT, CloudWatch ≈ $90/env) — and how to see it.
Fortem vs Cortex: Which Tool Actually Operates Your ECS Fleet?
Cortex is an Engineering Operations Platform for org-wide visibility. Fortem operates your ECS Fargate fleet specifically. Here's which one you need — and when to use both.
What Does DevOps Automation Miss Beyond CI/CD?
CI/CD automates deployment — not operations. 5 gaps every team discovers at 10+ environments: scheduling, self-service, cost tracking, cloning, orphans. Build vs buy breakdown.
ECS Fargate Best Practices: Running a Fleet of 10+ Environments Without the Pain
Seven Fargate best practices for teams at scale: naming conventions, fixed overhead, CloudWatch retention, Fargate Spot, quota isolation, Terraform state, and scheduling. Real numbers from AWS pricing.
How to Cut AWS Costs Without Reserved Instances
RIs and Savings Plans change how you pay, not what runs. Here are 5 methods that cut actual consumption — scheduling, right-sizing, Spot, auto-stop, and killing orphans — ranked by impact.
What Does AWS Fargate Actually Cost Per Environment?
AWS says $0.04048/vCPU-hr. Here's what a real environment costs — ALB, NAT Gateway, CloudWatch, data transfer — and the fixed overhead nobody budgets for.
Managing ECS Fargate with Terraform: What Works and What Doesn't
Terraform is the right tool for provisioning ECS Fargate infrastructure. But at 10+ environments, state sprawl and the ops gap catch every team. Three patterns, a tagging strategy, and what the operations layer needs to do.
ECS Multi-Environment Strategy: What Breaks at 10 That Worked Fine at 3
Naming conventions, cluster structure, and the five AWS limits that surface when environments scale from 3 to 10+. Fixed overhead, IAM proliferation, Fargate quota exhaustion — and what to get right before you hit the wall.
ECS Environment Scheduling: The Complete Guide
Stop paying for ECS dev and staging environments when nobody's using them. Every scheduling approach — AWS-native options, trade-offs, and what actually works at fleet scale.
AWS Proton is Deprecated: What ECS Teams Should Do Before October 7
AWS Proton shuts down October 7, 2026. Your ECS environments keep running — but the console, APIs, and every pipeline built on Proton stop working. Here's what breaks and how to migrate.
It's Friday at 6pm. Your Developer Can't Restart Staging Without You.
Platform engineers become the single point of failure for staging ops when developers have no safe, scoped way to act. Here's how to fix it with ECS environment RBAC.
AWS Copilot is Deprecated: Alternatives for ECS Fargate Teams
AWS Copilot CLI reaches end-of-support June 12, 2026. Your ECS services keep running — but here's what breaks, what to do next, and how to migrate.
Fortem vs Flightcontrol: ECS Fleet Management vs Single-App PaaS
Flightcontrol is the right tool for 1–3 apps on AWS. Here's exactly where it stops making sense — and where the pricing math breaks at fleet scale.
How to Cut AWS ECS Fargate Costs by 60–70%
Dev/staging environments run 168 hrs/week. Your team works 40. Here's the math on what that costs — and four methods to fix it, starting with the one most teams ignore.