It is relatively easy to run a few containers on your laptop, but building and maintaining an entire infrastructure to run and manage distributed applications is hard and often requires a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting.  In this talk we will discuss some of the core architectural principles underlying Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), a highly scalable, high performance service to run and manage distributed applications using the Docker container engine. We will walk through a number of patterns used by our customers to run their microservices platforms, to run batch jobs, and for deployments and continuous integration.  We will dive deep into the Amazon ECS Service Scheduler that is optimized for long running applications by monitoring container health, restarting failed containers, and load balancing across containers.