containers

EKS Kubernetes 1.36 is available with user namespaces GA and mutating admission policies. Since July 2026 you can roll back an in-place control-plane upgrade within 7 days at no extra charge — but only N→N-1, and Fargate or strict PDBs can block you.

AWS shipped ECS Express Mode on November 21, 2025 — three inputs (image + two IAM roles) and Express Mode provisions Fargate, ALB, HTTPS, auto scaling, and a *.ecs.*.on.aws URL. Up to 25 services can share one ALB. No Express Mode surcharge.

ECR storage is $0.10/GB-month — twice S3 Standard. Cross-region replication doubles or triples that. Enhanced scanning bills $0.09 per image scanned, on every push. Pull-through caches for Docker Hub and ECR Public add storage plus data-transfer-in. A 200-service organization with 10 environments and 3 regions can spend more on ECR than on the EKS clusters pulling from it.

Pick runtimes by ECS density and team skills — not synthetic RPS. July 2026: FrankenPHP worker vs PHP-FPM, Node, Go memory bands + density matrix.

A deep technical guide to running PHP, Python, and Node.js applications on Amazon ECS in production — covering Fargate vs EC2, FrankenPHP vs Nginx+FPM, multi-container task patterns, zero-downtime deployments, and observability.

ECS is "AWS-native containers." EKS is "Kubernetes, but you're still on the hook for everything Kubernetes." A decision guide for picking between ECS and EKS based on team Kubernetes experience, operational complexity, and the cost gap at production scale.