AWS App Mesh to Amazon ECS Service Connect Migration Guide
AWS is deprecating AWS App Mesh on September 30th, 2026, and this post details how to migrate to Amazon ECS Service Connect. Service Connect offers improved reliability, enhanced observability via CloudWatch metrics, and eliminates the need to manage sidecar proxies. The guide compares the abstractions and features of both services, providing strategies for a phased migration to minimize downtime.
- →Introduction to Amazon ECS Service Connect
- →AWS App Mesh Discontinuation and Support Period
- →Comparison of AWS App Mesh and ECS Service Connect Abstractions
- →Migration Strategies from App Mesh to Service Connect
- →Feature Differences: Reliability, Routing, Observability, and Security
Features (1) ›
- Introduction to Amazon ECS Service Connect
Amazon ECS Service Connect, introduced at re:Invent 2022, provides a managed solution for microservice connectivity within Amazon ECS, featuring built-in health checks, outlier detection, retry mechanisms, and application-level networking metrics sent to CloudWatch.
Enhancements (1) ›
- Migration Strategies from App Mesh to Service Connect
Migrating ECS services requires recreation as they cannot be part of both an App Mesh Mesh and a Service Connect Namespace simultaneously. Strategies like blue/green deployments using Route53 Weighted Routing, CloudFront, or multiple Application Load Balancer Target Groups are recommended to ensure zero downtime.
Notes (3) ›
- AWS App Mesh Discontinuation and Support Period
AWS App Mesh will be discontinued on September 30th, 2026. Existing customers can continue to use the service normally, including creating new resources and receiving security updates, until then. New customers will be unable to onboard to AWS App Mesh starting September 24th, 2024.
- Comparison of AWS App Mesh and ECS Service Connect Abstractions
The post contrasts the service mesh abstractions of AWS App Mesh (Virtual Services, Virtual Nodes, Virtual Routers, Envoy sidecars) with the streamlined abstractions of ECS Service Connect (Client/Server services within a Cloud Map namespace), highlighting differences in proxy management and configuration.
- Feature Differences: Reliability, Routing, Observability, and Security
While both services offer network reliability features, Service Connect has opinionated defaults for reliability and provides free CloudWatch metrics for observability. App Mesh offers more granular traffic routing and supports mTLS for security, features not yet available in Service Connect. Resource sharing across accounts is also a key difference.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/migrating-from-aws-app-mesh-to-amazon-ecs-service-connect/
Related releases
- Amazon EKS now supports advanced Kubernetes control plane configuration AWS What's New ·
- Amazon EKS 1.34+ enables forensic container checkpointing with Kubelet API AWS Containers Blog ·
- Amazon EKS introduces advanced Kubernetes control plane configuration AWS Containers Blog ·
- Amazon EKS Auto Mode automates node failure detection and repair AWS Containers Blog ·
- AWS Network Firewall adds forward proxy functionality AWS What's New ·
- AWS EMR on EKS Adds Apache Spark Troubleshooting Agent AWS Big Data Blog ·