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This is one of a few signals that may suggest ECS may not figure prominently in AWS future strategy.

politician 9y ago
That's an understatement! We've been watching ecs-agent development stagnate for the past 6 months until just a couple of weeks ago. 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/ https://istio.io/).
- NathanKP 9y ago
  AWS employee on the ECS team here. 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 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.
  - politician 9y ago
    These anecdotes are great, but, and I'm being honest here, I don't care about 450% growth or how many millions of container instances that are reportedly running. I care about long-standing bugs being fixed in a timely manner. 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.
    - NathanKP 9y ago
      I don't see any contact info on your profile. I'm not in Seattle but I am available at peckn@amazon.com and I can connect you to someone in Seattle you can talk to, or we can chat remotely.
      - politician 9y ago
        Sounds great, I'll reach out; thanks.
NathanKP 9y ago
AWS employee here on the ECS team. A service that does not figure prominently in AWS strategy would not be the first service featured in the keynote at re:Invent. AWS Fargate and EKS were the first things introduced this morning at the keynote.

That's an understatement! We've been watching ecs-agent development stagnate for the past 6 months until just a couple of weeks ago. 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/ https://istio.io/).

NathanKP 9y ago
AWS employee on the ECS team here. 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 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.
- politician 9y ago
  These anecdotes are great, but, and I'm being honest here, I don't care about 450% growth or how many millions of container instances that are reportedly running. I care about long-standing bugs being fixed in a timely manner. 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.
  - NathanKP 9y ago
    I don't see any contact info on your profile. I'm not in Seattle but I am available at peckn@amazon.com and I can connect you to someone in Seattle you can talk to, or we can chat remotely.
    - politician 9y ago
      Sounds great, I'll reach out; thanks.

NathanKP 9y ago

AWS employee here on the ECS team. A service that does not figure prominently in AWS strategy would not be the first service featured in the keynote at re:Invent. AWS Fargate and EKS were the first things introduced this morning at the keynote.