Lower AWS bill
Monthly AWS spend dropped from $600–700 to $400 — and has held there for several months, not just the first billing cycle after the move.
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Deployment · Cost
Moving off Laravel Vapor to ECS cut the AWS bill by a third
- ECS
- GitHub Actions
- Auto Scaling
- Load Balancer
- CloudFront
01Problem
The challenge
The client was running a PHP SaaS platform on Laravel Vapor. Vapor trades infrastructure control for convenience — it runs the application on Lambda behind API Gateway and bills per invocation, which gets expensive at steady, predictable traffic rather than spiky traffic. There was no way to right-size compute, no visibility into what was actually driving the bill, and every deploy went through Vapor's own pipeline rather than one the team could inspect or change.
02Architecture
How it fits together
03Solution
What I built
Move the application onto containers on ECS, with GitHub Actions handling builds and deploys instead of a managed platform.
01
ECS
Containers
The application runs as a task definition on ECS, so the exact CPU and memory it gets is a number in a config file, not whatever Vapor decided to allocate.
02
GitHub Actions
CI/CD
Pushing to main builds the image, pushes it to ECR, and rolls out a new ECS task definition — a pipeline the team can read and change themselves.
03
Auto Scaling
Capacity
ECS service auto scaling adds and removes tasks against real CPU and request-count targets, so capacity tracks actual load instead of a serverless platform's per-request pricing.
04
Application Load Balancer
Traffic
Routes incoming requests across the running tasks and handles health checks, so a bad deploy or a stalled task gets pulled out of rotation automatically.
05
CloudFront
CDN
Sits in front of the load balancer for static assets and TLS termination at the edge.
04Outcomes
What it delivered
Predictable deploys
GitHub Actions replaced a black-box managed pipeline with one the team can read, change, and debug when something goes wrong.
Right-sized capacity
ECS task sizing and auto scaling targets are set deliberately, not left to whatever a serverless platform decided to bill for.
The cost drop wasn't a one-time migration discount — it's the difference between paying for a serverless convenience tax on steady traffic and paying for the compute actually being used.
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