After Moving to ECS Express Mode: Amazon Q Insights
What happens after migrating to ECS Express Mode? Amazon Q breaks down post-migration scaling, operational control, and cost optimization.
Series: ECS Express Mode - Feedback (1 article)
- 1After Moving to ECS Express Mode: Amazon Q Insights This article
Background
At AWS Summit Jakarta, I gave a talk on migrating App Runner to ECS Express Mode.
AWS Summit - Screenshot
In short, sharing my experiences on how AI helped me prepare for the migration and execute the migration itself.
Honestly, it's quite easy and quick to migrate it. But I'm a bit afraid of the billing, of course.
Billing Concern
I'll use Amazon Q as my assistant to explain my billing from January to September 2026.
Amazon Q Explanation
Amazon Q is able to identify the usage of the new service without I asked clearyly what I want. Amazon Q generated the chart of the monthly usage, which is good for me to understand it. But it explained a lot of my concerns. The new service, ECS Express Mode, has the highest billing for me. This is a concern for me.
Amazon Q Result
The load balancer has the highest usage. Well, I should have expected this. The load balancer is on for 24 hours, which hit me for 24 hours, of course, even though I scaled down the ECS tasks.
Key Highlights from Amazon Q
Following up with a cost comparison question
Amazon Q answered with the provisioned GB-hours and vCPU-Hours to explain the real usage of my previous app.
App Runner Usage
I asked a follow-up question about the real cost, not only the resource usage.
More explanation of the usage
It seems the first explanation is a bit of a hallucination; that's why I tried to re-ask, and Amazon Q tried to revise the response.
What's Next?
I asked for a recommendation to optimize or lower the cost. I think some of the recommendations are actionable; however, some of them are not (unfortunately).
Recommendations that I agree with
- Amazon ECR regarding lifecycle policies. I turned on it, however, may be not really effective for now. I left the old image for quite a long time. This may incur storage costs. But I'm happy with this. Also, the region recommendation may happen if I don't notice where I store it and where I run the computation.
Amazon ECR recommendation
- Amazon ECS size. Yes, these are the next migration steps that I would like to do. I didn't expect to run it 24/7, so I might scale it to zero whenever possible.
Amazon ECS Tasks
Recommendations that I disagree with
- ECS Express Mode is managing the ELB. I didn't expect Amazon Q to try to recommend it. It seems to assume I don't use Express Mode.
Load Balancer Recommendation
Amazon VPC Recommendation
- Migrating back to App Runner. Unfortunately, it's not possible if I have deleted it before. So, it might be a good recommendation whenever I haven't removed it.
App Runner Recommendation
Lesson Learned
Well, at least I'm on the right path, which want to reduce it by the ECS task computation for my first step. I might need to analyze another aspect, or may be even better to move another service as well? Nah, I'm not sure. I think I will keep it in ECS Express Mode for a while. What do you think? Do you think there is another possible option? Feel free to give your feedback!
Series: ECS Express Mode - Feedback (1 article)
- 1After Moving to ECS Express Mode: Amazon Q Insights This article
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