Ultralight ditched AWS ECS for EKS with Northflank. Here’s why.

Ultralight is an early-stage, venture-backed company building software that helps medical device companies navigate FDA approvals.

They started on AWS ECS, but deployments were slow, debugging was painful, and compliance was a nightmare.

Co-founder and CTO Shiv Ghai switched to Northflank, gaining full control over deployments, automating infrastructure, and eliminating DevOps overhead.

After an initial short learning curve, they set up both staging and production environments in under an hour.

Ultralight was co-founded by Shiv Ghai, an engineer with experience at Bloomberg, Two Sigma, and Meta.

Having worked in finance, big tech, and now healthcare, he saw firsthand how different industries handle compliance-heavy software.

Hedge funds and FAANG companies had streamlined, powerful infrastructure. Medical device companies? Not so much.

“I was lucky to work at places that had good tools. Bloomberg, Two Sigma, Meta, they all had solid infra for compliance-heavy software. Medical device companies don’t.”

Ultralight was created to fill that gap. A platform that helps medical device companies develop software without struggling with compliance, documentation, and FDA approval workflows.

AWS ECS was holding them back.

From day one, Ultralight needed infrastructure that was secure, compliant, and scalable, but also developer-friendly.

They started on AWS ECS, hoping it would provide low-maintenance, containerized deployments.

It worked… for a while. Then the cracks started showing:

• Deployments were slow – ECS required more manual effort than expected.

• Not enough control – Shiv’s team couldn’t customize workflows the way they needed.

• ECS felt like a black box – Debugging and troubleshooting issues took too long.

“We were doing ECS deployments and wanted a little bit more control. We wanted more power.”

Ultralight wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. They aren’t an infrastructure company; they are a medical software company.

ECS was forcing them to spend too much time on infrastructure, pulling focus away from building their core product.

Shiv and his team explored multiple platforms to replace ECS, looking for something that gave them more control but without the complexity of running everything from scratch.

They tested several alternatives, but none felt quite right:

• Some were too restrictive, abstracting away too much control.
• Others left behind resources after deletion, creating unnecessary infrastructure clutter.
• Most required too much upfront investment in learning and setup.

“With other platforms, leftover resources caused problems and trust issues. When I started from scratch on Northflank, everything cleaned up perfectly. It inspired more trust.”

Northflank struck the perfect balance: powerful and flexible, yet easy to use.

It gave Ultralight the benefits of Kubernetes without forcing them to deal with Kubernetes.

“The self-serve process within Northflank was the best out of all the other providers I tried.”

Shiv didn’t have to book a sales call. He didn’t need a multi-week onboarding process. He and his team simply signed up and started deploying.

Ultralight didn’t have deep Kubernetes experience.

But with Northflank, that didn’t matter:

“We had no idea how to manage Kubernetes initially. Northflank allowed us to quickly and easily leverage its full potential.”

Instead of wrestling with raw Kubernetes configurations, Ultralight could deploy applications quickly, while still having the flexibility to customize infrastructure as needed.

Unlike other platforms that left stray infrastructure behind, Northflank ensured clean state resets, reducing clutter and keeping their AWS environment tidy.

No lingering infrastructure, no rogue AWS charges, no mystery services you forgot about.

Ultralight needed complete isolation between staging and production, which Northflank made simple:

• Dedicated Kubernetes clusters for staging and production.
• Clear network separation and access controls.
• Compliance-focused deployment workflows.

During a critical migration from ECS, Northflank shined:

“We needed to complete the migration quickly, and Northflank’s self-service, documentation and first-class Slack support got us through it quickly.”

Once they got comfortable with Northflank, Ultralight saw immediate benefits.

“Once set up, I had one engineer handle staging, another handle production, and both were fully operational within an hour on a single call.”

Other immediate wins:

• Faster builds. They switched to Northflank’s build infrastructure, making builds more stable and cost-efficient:

“We previously managed builds within our own cluster. Now, Northflank’s build infrastructure provides much greater stability and lower costs.”

• More reliable infrastructure. No more unexpected downtime or manual workarounds.
• Simplified deployments. One-click deployments for staging, manual releases for production, all configured exactly how they wanted.

Ultralight is doubling down on automation.

They’re now working on advanced caching optimizations and leveraging Northflank’s caching features to further reduce build times. Shiv summed it up:

“Northflank transformed our infrastructure from a frustration into a genuine strength.”

With their infrastructure running smoothly, Ultralight is fully focused on helping medical device companies bring new products to market faster, without getting slowed down by DevOps headaches.

Unlike most teams that rely on Vercel or Netlify for static sites and separate backend infrastructure, Ultralight kept everything simple and low-cost by deploying both through Northflank.

The platform’s flexibility allowed them to stand up a full-stack setup (static frontend and backend) without stitching together multiple services or overcomplicating orchestration.