[TheHydroImpulse]

One thing we experienced at Segment was the fact that we needed to quickly handle a surge in volume but couldn't overload partners. Essentially we wanted something that scaled up quickly at first but was pretty conservative after that.

We settled on constant increases/decreases using queue depth thresholds but ideally ECS would support feeding multiple metrics and doing some basic math to figure out how much we're currently process, how long it would take to flush the queue, and how many more containers we need to drain in a timely fashion.

[cobookman]

Have you looked into kubernetes?

[TheHydroImpulse]

A bunch of people at Segment have looked into it. We manage our infrastructure with Terraform and operationally IMO Kubernetes introduces too much complexity compared with ECS and Terraform.

ECS is pretty dead simple (just run an agent on the host) and while it doesn't offer nearly the same feature set, it's really good operationally.

Some people here are tinkering with it for some non-core services.