Why we moved our ECS services from Fargate to EC2

Tines transitioned its workflow automation platform from AWS Fargate to an EC2-backed ECS Capacity Provider to address scalability challenges and enhance deployment reliability. While Fargate offered simplicity, it fell short in handling the company's rapid deployment needs and introduced issues like "Fargate capacity unavailable" errors and stale code. By shifting to EC2, Tines gained greater control over hardware, improved performance for compute-heavy tasks, and achieved cost savings through a Mixed Instances Policy leveraging Spot instances. Despite the increased operational overhead, the migration resulted in better deployment stability, performance improvements, and moderate cost savings, although it also unveiled new challenges such as task startup timeouts. The experience underscored the value of flexibility and control over infrastructure, sparking internal discussions on potential future transitions to Kubernetes, albeit with the same EC2 capacity approach.