Show HN: Mercek – A Desktop IDE for AWS ECS (opens in new tab)

Neat, but this feels to me like buying a single-use kitchen gadget. Yes, the console does not have everything neatly together like this, but it can manage everything across all AWS services.

Having to deal with a separate (electron) app for every AWS service would be a nightmare.

how do i know this doesnt have malware installed ?

Tried it out for a few mins and it does what advertised. I think Electron is perfectly fine for what this app does: Managing ECS. It's not an all-in-one platform the same way VSCode is, so bloating isn't really an issue. On my M2 MacBook pro 64GB, it's sitting at 30.5 Mb of memory usage. JetBrains' toolbox app (Written using Java) is sitting at 505.1Mb and this app arguably does more than that one, if not an equal amount. The wallpaper process is taking up 29.9Mb of memory, so this app amounts to just another wallpaper worth of memory which is nothing.

However, for any app that aims to be an "all-in-one" desktop GUI replacement for the aws console, which may need extensions, a native framework would be the way to go over electron.

One piece of feedback I have is to just have a selection menu for models from providers rather than asking the user to input text, as well as an option for effort level if available.

This is great, and will be keen to have a look at helping for Linux support you have planned. ECS is one of the better products AWS has produced IMO. It has its warts, but it has made very intentional trade offs between simplicity and control/flexibility, and for a very large amount of use cases, I think they have made some really good choices. Thanks for sharing!

Fun fact: The word "lens" comes from "lentil" (because of the shape).

"Mercek" means lens in Turkish, and similarly it comes from the Turkish word "mercimek" (which means lentil).

The AI-style CSS that all AI apps have is an instant turn off to me.

E1S is solid for terminal use, but a visual task and service view helps when you are debugging across clusters. Does this handle cross-region ECS or only single region?

I want to try this, but unfortunately there are just too many Electron applications on my computer now.

I literally cannot run anymore without slowing everything down.

This is something which other software makers need to start considering.

There's actually limited RAM now on machines.

Codex and Claude Desktop both are gigantic memory hogs. And they leak memory all the time, but they provide value which is quite high.

Add in a couple of editors and the GitHub app. And then the actual browsers. And it actually stops me from downloading any more electron apps.

Could this be made into a native application?

I used to work at AWS and I can't tell you the number of times I wished someone had built something like this! Kudos.

this is great. no electron is a bonus too lmao.

too many tools are ai focused, good to see someones making a human eyes tool again.

question though; do you plan on extending to other aws services?

Would it kill you to use a standard native toolkit library rather than whatever black square this is

Thanks for sharing this and congrats on shipping! I, too, feel this pain.

There was a similar undertaking to create something like k9s for ECS called E1S:

https://github.com/keidarcy/e1s

And I too intended to build one to server my specific ops needs and satisfy my taste for what information should be presented instead of how AWS organizes thing.

The project is open source as well https://github.com/utibeabasi6/mercek