Cool read. I don't use Kubernetes but I learned a few things from this blog post that are applicable to my ECS environment.

The NGINX config part is tricky and it didn't come to mind that many programs will try to be smart about machine resources and it won't work in the container world as expected. This was a good reminder. OP didn't mention what Linux distro he's using and what are all of the OS-level configs he changed in the end of the day; I'd like to see that (was there any config not mentioned in the post?).

It's awesome that OP had lots of monitoring to guide him through the problem discovery and experimentation. I need more of this in my ECS setup. I didn't hop on the Prometheus train yet, by the way.