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Grada

ECS Fargate and ALB as the Single Runtime Target

  • Status: Superseded by ADR-0014 — Lambda and static targets added; ECS Fargate + ALB remains the default.
  • Date: 2026-09-24 (Retroactive)

Context and Problem Statement

Section titled “Context and Problem Statement”

grada promises that any supported framework deploys with one command. Every framework-specific Dockerfile, health-check rule, Terraform module (templates/terraform/), and diagnostic runbook only works if there is exactly one production runtime to target.

We needed to pick a single AWS compute and ingress combination that covers long-running web servers, workers, and static sites without per-framework infrastructure branches.

Decision Drivers

Section titled “Decision Drivers”
  • Uniformity: One set of Terraform modules, one container contract, one diagnostic story for all frameworks.
  • No-ops fit: Users choosing this tool do not run an infra team; the runtime must be serverless and scale to zero operational burden.
  • Health-checkability: The load balancer must probe container health so failed deploys surface as ALB signals, not silent black holes.

Considered Options

Section titled “Considered Options”
  1. AWS Lambda / App Runner per framework. (Rejected: request/response and timeout limits exclude long-running servers and workers; would force framework-specific branches.)
  2. EC2 / self-managed clusters. (Rejected: reintroduces the server management the tool exists to remove.)
  3. ECS Fargate + Application Load Balancer. Containers stay portable across frameworks; ALB gives path-based health checks, listener rules (translated from vercel.json), and zero-downtime rolling deploys.

Decision Outcome

Section titled “Decision Outcome”

Chosen Option: ECS Fargate + ALB for all dynamic workloads. Every generated project provisions the same cluster/service/ALB shape; only the image contents and container port vary per framework.

Positive Consequences

Section titled “Positive Consequences”
  • Framework support reduces to Dockerfile + port + bind-address requirements (src/utils/detector.js, src/utils/warnings.js).
  • diagnose can assume ALB health-check semantics for every project.
  • Static sites reuse the same pipeline with an Nginx image instead of a framework server.

Negative Consequences

Section titled “Negative Consequences”
  • Cold-start-sensitive or GPU workloads are out of scope; the tool cannot serve them without a second runtime target.
  • Users pay Fargate minimums even for idle preview environments.