alt.hn

6/4/2026 at 9:15:16 PM

Show HN: Mercek – A Desktop IDE for AWS ECS

 https://www.mercek.dev/

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 5:09:34 AM

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!

by layoric

6/5/2026 at 5:35:35 AM

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

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 12:20:42 AM

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.

by deepspace

6/5/2026 at 5:52:50 AM

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.

by layoric

6/5/2026 at 1:49:57 AM

Do one thing and do it well, right?

by efskap

6/5/2026 at 5:15:44 AM

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

by selcuka

6/5/2026 at 2:45:27 PM

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

by fuzzylightbulb

6/5/2026 at 4:28:05 AM

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

by utibeumanah

6/6/2026 at 2:24:10 AM

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?

by ryanshrott

6/6/2026 at 4:47:23 AM

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

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 2:04:42 AM

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

by weakfish

6/5/2026 at 4:38:44 PM

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.

by canthonytucci

6/5/2026 at 12:05:32 AM

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.

by leetrout

6/5/2026 at 4:05:53 AM

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).

by selcuka

6/5/2026 at 4:21:07 AM

haha, thats exactly why i chose the name

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 10:59:41 AM

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.

by anoop4bhat

6/5/2026 at 12:19:39 PM

Thanks! I’m glad you like it

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 12:11:33 AM

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?

by ishanr

6/5/2026 at 4:29:25 AM

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

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 2:23:15 AM

[flagged]

by hanzeweiasa

6/5/2026 at 2:58:38 PM

[flagged]

by Hankk

6/5/2026 at 12:04:36 PM

[flagged]

by zop_10

6/5/2026 at 12:50:26 AM

[flagged]

by baskduf

6/5/2026 at 1:38:40 AM

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.

by waterTanuki

6/5/2026 at 5:13:24 AM

> 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.

by selcuka

6/5/2026 at 4:24:04 AM

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

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 6:45:47 AM

how do i know this doesnt have malware installed ?

by oliver236

6/5/2026 at 7:16:25 AM

its open source you can read the code

by utibeumanah

6/5/2026 at 8:16:15 AM

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

by oliver236

6/5/2026 at 2:57:03 PM

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

by fuzzylightbulb

6/5/2026 at 11:28:53 AM

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

by mx7zysuj4xew

6/5/2026 at 12:43:22 PM

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

by teitoklien