Introduction: What is Amazon ECS?
Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a fully managed container orchestration service platform that simplifies running, stopping, and managing Docker containers in a cluster. Today, teams are adopting ECS to deploy containerized applications to remove the operational burden of managing infrastructure stacks whilst retaining the flexibility of containerized workloads. Even with these advantages, ECS users still require security, observability, and configurable routing across their instances.
Enter Gloo Mesh: Bringing It All Together
Gloo Mesh now delivers full enterprise-grade service mesh capabilities to ECS workloads. Previously, AWS ECS users lacked a unified way to enforce security, policy, and governance across environments. Teams relied on custom scripts and ad-hoc integrations to bridge ECS with other tools and platforms, resulting in fragmented controls, operational debt, inconsistent policy enforcement, and increased risk exposure. Additionally, ECS users who previously relied on App Mesh will soon need an alternative, as AWS has announced that App Mesh will be deprecated in the fall of 2026 with many enterprise teams already preparing for this transition.
In the latest 2.11 release, Gloo Mesh introduces native support for ECS built on Istio’s Ambient mode. This release provides ECS users with access to a industry-leading reliable service mesh, eliminating the need for customization or manual reconfigurations between workloads. With this integration, ECS users can now utilize the full set of Istio capabilities and Gloo Mesh enterprise policies while maintaining a simple operational model that aligns with the elasticity of ECS.
With Gloo Mesh, ECS workloads can join the mesh through a simple and guided workflow. Teams can manage ECS tasks as first-class services and apply zero-trust security, unified telemetry, and traffic policies consistently. This creates a smooth and dependable path forward for App Mesh users who want a solution that is more scalable, easier to manage, and supported by the broader Istio ecosystem.
Setting Up Gloo Mesh for ECS-to-ECS Traffic
Follow the workflow below showcasing how to enable service-to-service communication across ECS using Gloo Mesh.
- Create the Hub (EKS Cluster):
Start by creating an Amazon EKS cluster. This cluster hosts the Gloo Mesh control plane, which manages service discovery and traffic policies for all connected ECS tasks.
- Install Gloo Mesh:
Once the EKS cluster is up and running, the next step is to perform a minimal installation of Gloo Mesh. This includes deploying the control plane and setting up an East-West Gateway.
The control plane will perform automatic service discovery on all ECS resources, and the East-West Gateway is a crucial component that handles traffic flow between ECS and EKS, as well as proxying traffic across ECS clusters if security requirements restrict direct access.
- Connect ECS Services to the Mesh:
After installing Gloo Mesh, the next step is to integrate your ECS workloads. By providing Gloo Mesh with the necessary AWS account roles and permissions, the mesh can automatically discover ECS services and bring them into the mesh environment.
This means your ECS services become part of a unified network where traffic is secured and observable.
With everything installed and in place, you can now test and validate the connectivity.
Traffic between ECS services should flow seamlessly through the mesh and ECS tasks should communicate directly across clusters. All traffic is encrypted and visible through mesh telemetry, allowing users to observe traffic patterns and ensure policies are enforced.
Exploring Traffic Patterns
Gloo Mesh unlocks various traffic and communication patterns for ECS environments:
- ECS to ECS communication across the same cluster or across multiple clusters, including support for multiple AWS accounts.
- ECS to EKS or any Kubernetes cluster and the reverse direction.
- ECS to virtual machines such as EC2 instances or any other VM-based workload, and the reverse.
All these traffic paths can benefit from full mesh capabilities, including secured communication, deep observability, and advanced traffic management. Gloo Mesh offers a reliable and stable path forward for teams transitioning away from App Mesh or requiring a long-term supported mesh that works natively with ECS at scale.
For more details, check out our documentation.
Want to learn more about Gloo Mesh within an Amazon ECS environment? Check out this live demo below.
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