Show HN: Mercek – A Desktop IDE for AWS ECS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mercek – A Desktop IDE for AWS ECS

mercek.dev

64 pointsutibeumanah31 comments

Hey HN I've been using ECS for a while now and found it annoying having to log into the console everytime

I use Lens for Kubernetes but couldnt find an equivalent for ECS so i built one!

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

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!

Thanks! Will appreciate the Linux support, glad you like it

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.

Do one thing and do it well, right?

Define "one". If AWS is a single service, then this tool does 1/100 things.

No one would classify AWS as a single service. The name is literally "Amazon Web Services".

This isnt built with electron, it's built with Rust and React using Tauri

The cross cutting concerns with ECS + ALB + ASGs + Capacity providers + target groups + EC2 instances + launch templates means that ECS is somewhat central to the larger context of your hosted system. I really like ECS, but AWS have done a poor job of presenting all the linked parts stemming from ECS that this app actually tries to solve. Yes, it wraps several services to achieve this because it has to, but ECS is central enough that having an app like this to show things in a more contextualized way I think can be extremely useful.

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).

haha, thats exactly why i chose the name

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

Can you describe the “AI-style CSS” look? It’s gone over my head. I thought this thing looks pretty nice, kind of jetbrainsy maybe.

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.

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?

Yes it handles cross region. This was added in the latest release (0.3.2)

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?

It's not an electron app Its built with a Rust framework called Tauri Memory usage is highly optimized

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.

Thanks! I’m glad you like it

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

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?

I didn’t plan on extending to other AWS services I intended this to be focused on ECS like lens is for K8S But if there is demand then I might

how do i know this doesnt have malware installed ?

its open source you can read the code

why do you downvote me? there are so many open source repos that have become infected

This is a reasonable question. Not everyone can do a full audit of the codebase, regardless of how open the source is.

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

go build one for free and then lecture others, besides i think his UI looks wonderful, props to the creator of this ECS app for sharing it with the world

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.

thanks for the feedback! This isnt built with electron actually It's Rust and React using a framework called Tauri

> it's sitting at 30.5 Mb of memory usage

Tauri uses the webview provided by the OS instead of bundling a full Chrome installation. The downside is that it may not look the same on all platforms.

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