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AWS Just Let 25 ECS Services Share One Load Balancer — and Stop Paying for 25
Amazon ECS Gateway provisions, routes, and scales ALBs for you — no more one dedicated load balancer per service by default
Overview
AWS announced Amazon ECS Gateway on October 20, 2026 — a fully-managed ingress layer for ECS that dynamically provisions and manages Application Load Balancers on your behalf. The practical effect: up to 25 ECS services can now share a single ALB instead of each one requiring its own, with ECS automatically handling routing, certificates, and scaling the number of load balancers as capacity actually requires it.
The cost problem this actually addresses
An Application Load Balancer in AWS carries a base hourly charge of roughly $0.0225 in US East — about $16.43 a month before any traffic — plus usage-based LCU charges on top of that for connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations (billed on whichever dimension is highest that hour, not the sum). That’s a manageable number for one service. It becomes a real, unglamorous recurring cost once a team following the conventional “one ALB per ECS service” pattern is running twenty, fifty, or more services, each with its own dedicated load balancer sitting there billing by the hour regardless of how much traffic it’s actually…
