Ah that's cool, makes sense. We may eventually move to Fargate, but the project has some legacy stuff that somewhat relies on having a host machine because of its shared directory. I've set up a roadmap to gradually remove the restrictions that prevent us from transitioning from EC2 to Fargate.

I've learned a lot more implementation details in this project than I expected. For example, I think stuff like awsvpc network mode is a code smell. I did appreciate some of the work that AWS did though for just mounting an EFS filesystem like any other path in the ecs-params.yml file though.

I did try it, but EFS latency is too high to run a whole server (at least for PHP). It does work for a storage folder though. Specifically, PHP Composer feels like it will never finish if the whole project directory is on EFS. But if I changed the build system to pre-build all of the Docker images, it might be ok.

To me, Amazon doing their job would look like: no distinction between EC2 and Fargate. They should have provided a host filesystem out-of-the-box (that uses EFS internally) enabled by default with the option to disable it. But that's not the AWS way. In AWS, each service gives you 90% of a typical use case. The other 10% comes from the 10 other services that you must learn in unison.

But hey, this pain could easily be someone else's meal ticket if they automate the worst parts!