ECS is the way imo. I dislike the complexity in auth around cloud services but ECS is a really nice way to build scalable systems cheaply. I am a big fan of using the underlying Fargate spot machines within ECS.
I inherited a project on fly.io but before that I’ve used ECS as my primary platform. While ECS is kubernetes lite, fly is ECS but a little more dev friendly in the realm of not dealing with the complexities of IAM etc. It has other downfalls, but it’s the sweet spot for my early stage products right low…although i do expect I’ll end up on ECS if this is going well a year from now.
Mostly just because it’s there already, and after getting familiar with it i really like how fast it is to get a project started. Ecs is great, but fly is 10x easier to deploy to.
I love ECS. But I'd also tip my cap to Azure App Service. They're both full flexible models that utilize the core services of public cloud but limit your exposure to the bare necessities.
CDN->Load Balancer->autoscale docker->database. That serves 90% of use cases but you'll have access to the myriad other services they offer for anything else that comes up.