I don't have that much experience with ECS, but it's a lot different than just having a remote docker host or docker swarm. You can't use docker-compose to just automagically spin up a project. I think they have their own yaml format that's similar to docker-compose V1 files, but it's cumbersome to not know what is and isn't supported and what amazon specific features you need to use, etc.

If you're new to AWS but know Docker (like me) then Docker for AWS seems like a winner.