What is mercek?

Mercek is a desktop app for Mac and Linux that gives you a single window to manage Amazon ECS, which is a cloud service from Amazon used to run containerized software (packaged applications that carry their own dependencies). Instead of clicking through the Amazon web console, which can be slow and difficult to use across multiple accounts, Mercek reads your existing AWS login credentials from your machine and shows all your running services at once. The app is read-only by default. You can see the health of your services, check live logs, view CPU and memory usage, and monitor recent deployments. When you want to make a change, such as rolling back a deployment or updating a container image, Mercek shows you a confirmation screen before sending anything to Amazon. Nothing is stored or sent to a third party: Mercek talks directly to your AWS account and nothing else. Some of the more advanced features include an interactive shell that lets you connect directly to a running container, a topology map that shows how your services connect through load balancers, a background watcher that flags stalled deployments or memory crashes, and a built-in cost estimate based on actual usage peaks. There is also an agent panel that lets you connect a coding assistant like Claude Code to the app, even then, any change the assistant proposes goes through the same diff-and-confirm step before it reaches AWS. The app is built with Rust for the backend (using a framework called Tauri that packages Rust code as a native desktop window) and React with TypeScript for the interface. The source code is publicly available and the project is licensed under MIT, meaning you can use and modify it freely. macOS users should note that the current builds are not yet Apple-notarized, which triggers a security warning on first launch, the README explains three ways to open the app past that prompt.