If you're on AWS, yeah, I'd say just use ECS until you need more complexity. Our ECS deployments have been unproblematic for years now.
Our K8s clusters never goes more than a couple days without some sort of strange issue popping up. Arguably it could be because my company outsourced maintenance of it to an army of idiots. But K8s is a tool that is only as good as the operator, and competence can be hard to come by at some companies.
Agreed. But if you're already on AWS, I'd say the quality floor is already higher than the potential at 95%+ of other companies.
So I say unless you're at a company that pays top salaries for the top 5% of engineering talent, you're probably better off just using the AWS provided service.
I used to have a saying back when Heroku was more favourable, is that you use Heroku because you want to go bankrupt. AWS is at times similar.
Depending on your local market, AWS bills might be way worse than the cost of few bright ops people who will let you choose from offerings including running dev envs on random assortment of dedicated servers and local e-waste escapees
Our K8s clusters never goes more than a couple days without some sort of strange issue popping up. Arguably it could be because my company outsourced maintenance of it to an army of idiots. But K8s is a tool that is only as good as the operator, and competence can be hard to come by at some companies.