Seconded--I can tell the ECS documentation is trying to help, but the foreign task/service/cluster model + crude console UI keeps telling me to let my workload ride on EC2 and maybe come back later.
what I figured out much later was that ECS is a thin layer on top of a number of AWS services - they use an AMI that I can use, ec2 VMs that I can run myself and Security Groups + IAMs that I can create by my own.
But the way they have built the ECS layer is very very VERY bad.. and I have an unusually high threshold for documentation pain.
I work on Convox, an open source PaaS. Currently it is AWS only. It sets up a cluster correctly in a few minutes. Then you have a simple API - apps, builds, releases, environment and processes - to work with. Under the hood we deploy to ECS but you don't have to worry about it.
So I do agree that ECS is hard to use but with better tooling it doesn't have to be.
