[NewJazz]

It seems like you are comparing ECS to a self-managed Kubernetes cluster. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare to EKS or another managed Kubernetes offering? Many of your points don't apply in that case, especially around updates.

[moduspol]

A managed Kubernetes offering removes only some of the pain, and adds more in other areas. You're still on the hook for updating whatever add-ons you're using, though yes, it'll depend on how many you're using, and how painful it will be varies depending on how well your cloud provider handles it.

Most of my managed Kubernetes experience is through Amazon's EKS, and the pain I remember included frustration from the supported Kubernetes versions being behind the upstream versions, lack of visibility for troubleshooting control nodes, and having to explain / understand delays in NIC and EBS appropriation / attachments for pods. Also the ALB ingress controller was something I needed to install and maintain independently (though that may be different now).

Though that was also without us going neck-deep into being vendor agnostic. Using EKS just for the Kubernetes abstractions without trying hard to be vendor agnostic is valid--it's just not what I was comparing above because it was usually that specific business requirement that steered us toward Kubernetes in the first place.

If you ARE using EKS with the intention of keeping as much as possible vendor agnostic, that's also valid, but then now you're including a lot of the stuff I complained about in my other comment: your own metrics stack, your own logging stack, your own alarm stack, your own CNI configuration, etc.