Cloud-Native Development

• Stateless services: Application state stored in managed services (RDS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB) never on container filesystem. Any container instance can handle any request. Enables horizontal scaling.
• Config via environment: All configuration (database URLs, API keys, feature flags) injected as environment variables never hardcoded. AWS Secrets Manager for secrets, SSM Parameter Store for non-sensitive config.
• Immutable infrastructure: Container images built once and promoted through environments unchanged. No SSH, no manual changes on running instances.
• Health checks & graceful shutdown: Every service exposes /health/ready and /health/live. ECS Fargate/K8s use these to route traffic and replace unhealthy instances. Graceful shutdown: on SIGTERM, service finishes in-flight requests before exiting no dropped connections.
• Observability from day one: Structured JSON logging (Pino/structlog → CloudWatch), OpenTelemetry distributed tracing (W3C Trace Context), Prometheus metrics (counters, histograms, gauges → Grafana).
• Automated deployment: No manual deployments. GitHub Actions on merge to main: build → test → push to ECR → update ECS task definition → rolling update (zero-downtime).
• Loose coupling: Services communicate via well-defined APIs (REST/gRPC) or event queues (SQS, SNS, EventBridge) never by sharing a database.

ECS Fargate is simpler and sufficient for most B2B products. It runs containerised applications without requiring you to manage EC2 nodes (Fargate manages the underlying compute you define the task and Fargate runs it). ECS is deeply integrated with AWS services (ALB, ACM, Secrets Manager, IAM) and has less operational overhead. Choose ECS Fargate when: your team is not already Kubernetes-experienced, your application is a standard web service/API/background worker, and you want the lowest possible operational overhead. Choose EKS (Kubernetes) when: you need advanced traffic management (canary deployments, blue-green with fine-grained traffic splitting), your team has existing Kubernetes expertise, you need to run the same workload on multiple clouds, or you require Kubernetes-specific tooling (Helm charts, custom operators). ClickMasters uses ECS Fargate as default for new builds and EKS for organisations with specific Kubernetes requirements.