A developer frustrated by constantly switching to the AWS console for ECS management built Mercek, a desktop application that brings Lens-like experience to Amazon's container service. The tool reads existing ~/.aws profiles and displays clusters, services, and tasks across multiple accounts and regions in a unified tree view. It operates read-only by default, requiring explicit approval before any infrastructure changes.

Mercek packs comprehensive monitoring features including live rollout state, deployment circuit breaker status, and automatic rollback capabilities to previous task definitions. The application pulls CPU and memory metrics from Container Insights with fallback to AWS/ECS metrics, while load-balanced services display request count, latency, and 5xx errors. Users can estimate monthly Fargate costs and receive over- or under-provisioning recommendations based on peak usage analysis.

Security-conscious design keeps everything local—there's no telemetry, no backend server, and credentials never leave your machine. The tool supports interactive shell access via ECS Exec, log tailing with filtering, and automatic dependency mapping through load balancers to services. An agent panel integrates external coding assistants like Claude Code, allowing read-only state inspection and diff-based change suggestions for user approval.

Currently available for macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel architectures, with Linux and Windows versions planned for future releases. The project is entirely open source under the MIT license, requiring no account creation or additional infrastructure permissions beyond existing AWS CLI credentials.