The Short Answer
Team under 20 engineers, standard web workloads, AWS-native infrastructure, no multi-cloud requirement: use ECS Fargate. Kubernetes operational overhead is real and often not worth the flexibility at this scale.
Choose ECS When
- Standard containerised web application workloads without exotic scheduling needs
- No multi-cloud or on-premise portability requirement
- No dedicated platform engineering team to own the control plane
- Speed to production is the priority in the first 12 months
Choose Kubernetes When
- Multi-cloud or on-premise data residency requirements (healthcare, fintech)
- Custom scheduling requirements: GPU nodes, MIG partitioning, spot instance handling
- Building an internal developer platform that other teams deploy workloads onto
- The team already has deep, proven Kubernetes operational expertise
The Migration Reality
We have migrated three clients from ECS to EKS as they outgrew the simpler platform. Each migration took 6–10 weeks. Starting with ECS and migrating later when complexity is justified is a legitimate and often optimal strategy.