ADR-0004: Target AWS ECS/CDK in us-east-1 for beta
- Status: Accepted
- Date: 2026-09-19
- Scope: Future beta infrastructure
Context
The beta needs a bounded operational footprint and an infrastructure definition that can be reviewed before creation. Stateless API and asynchronous worker processes fit container deployment, while PostgreSQL, object storage, and queueing need managed services.
Decision
- Define future AWS infrastructure with CDK.
- Use a single beta region:
us-east-1.
- Run reviewed API and meal-analysis worker images as separate ECS services/tasks.
- Use managed PostgreSQL, object storage, and queueing equivalents for the existing local PostgreSQL/S3/SQS boundaries.
- Use managed secrets, encryption, private data paths, least privilege, logs/metrics/alarms, and backup controls.
- Treat identity, email, certificates, DNS, and optional social identity as explicit reviewed dependencies.
This is a topology decision, not deployment authorization. No cloud environment, resource name, account, or production image is established by this ADR.
Consequences
- A single region reduces beta complexity and cost.
- A regional outage can exceed availability and recovery targets; multi-region failover is not provided.
- ECS keeps API/worker runtime portability while AWS service adapters still create platform coupling.
- CDK output is reviewable, but synthesis success does not establish security or operability.
- Data residency and vendor-region suitability must be confirmed before beta.
Follow-up
- Complete threat modeling, networking, image provenance, runtime secrets, observability, backup/restore, cost limits, and operator access.
- Validate the 15-minute RPO, four-hour RTO, and 99.9% core availability target.
- Revisit region and disaster-recovery strategy after beta evidence or before broader launch.