Although AWS ECS is not really designed to run stateful apps, sometimes you’ve got no choice. I ran into one of these situations recently where I wanted to run an IRC bot called Limnoria which didn’t rely on any standard database that I could get managed from any cloud provider like AWS. Instead, the data was stored in the filesystem in various flat-file formats. Obviously, it was not feasable to have the data lost across ECS instances, so I needed to find ’true’ persistent storage.