ECS vs EKS: The Decision I Regret (And What I’d Do Differently Now)

The first time things broke in production, I didn’t even know where to look. Not “figuratively lost.” I mean literally. Pods were restarting. Logs were half there. Metrics were… somewhere. And I was SSH’ing into nodes like it was 2016, trying to understand why a simple Node.js service decided to disappear mid traffic. That was the moment I quietly said to myself: “Maybe choosing EKS wasn’t the flex I thought it was.” A few months earlier, the decision felt obvious. We were starting fresh. New se