For Meteor, it is now simple to orchestrate and manage its Galaxy container clusters. “What’s unique about Galaxy isn’t how container management works—it’s the management of the connected clients on top of the platform,” says DeBergalis. “That’s where we want to spend our time, and we can do that because Amazon ECS minimizes the number of technical considerations we need to worry about.” Amazon ECS also integrates well with other AWS technologies, according to DeBergalis. “Amazon ECS integrates with other parts of our AWS stack in ways that save us a lot of time and code,” he says. “For example, if I register a service within ECS, that service is automatically registered within Elastic Load Balancing. That’s a lot of behind the scenes functionality that we don’t have to worry about.”

As a result of simplified container management, Meteor was able to quickly get Galaxy into customers’ hands. “When we launched Galaxy, we had customers in production within a month, and that was only possible because Amazon ECS helps us run a reliable container orchestration service. It gave us a lot of confidence as far as bringing customer workloads onto Galaxy,” says DeBergalis. “With ECS, we were able carve out a big technical piece of our infrastructure from the usual development and testing cycles.”

AWS also supports multiple Availability Zones, which was critical to the Galaxy platform. “In order to deliver a highly available platform to our users, we need a container orchestration service that is highly available as well,” DeBergalis says. “We need to be able to run users’ applications across multiple zones, so that if one chunk of the service goes offline, other parts are unaffected. Amazon ECS is unique in that it addresses availability as a turnkey capability, rather than requiring us to write a complex piece of software to do it. With ECS, we have a simple architecture that was faster to build, easier to test, and simpler to maintain than managing those technical details inside of Galaxy itself.”

Meteor has also addressed its scalability challenges by using AWS. “There’s a very strong story around scalability in AWS,” says DeBergalis. “Our big questions were, ‘Can we scale the amount of compute resources necessary to run all our customers’ apps?’ and, ‘Can we scale the mechanics of coordinating all those pieces?’ Using AWS, we can answer ‘yes’ to both.”

In addition, Meteor’s own developers can operate faster. “Our engineering team developing Galaxy can move much faster because of the elasticity they get by using AWS,” says DeBergalis. “For provisioning new resources, it really just takes the push of a few buttons, and we have an entire infrastructure that makes it easy for us to build end-to-end tests across the entire system. It’s now easy to do scalability testing as a normal part of our development process, rather than as a huge effort at the end of the process, hoping it all works out.”

Using AWS to support Galaxy, Meteor can better meet the needs of developers creating modern apps. “We’re at the leading edge of the developer experience using JavaScript for mobile and web apps,” says DeBergalis. “And using AWS, we’re also at the leading edge of container and container-management technology to scale and operate those apps. That’s the future of app development.”