Getting started
Mercek is a desktop app for Amazon ECS. There's no setup beyond the AWS credentials you already have.
Install
Mercek is a native macOS app for Apple Silicon and Intel. Download it from the home page, move it to Applications, and open it.
It doesn't create an account or run a server. The first time you open it, it reads the AWS profiles already on your machine.
How credentials work
Mercek uses your existing AWS credential chain. That's the same ~/.aws/config and ~/.aws/credentials the AWS CLI uses, so SSO, assume-role, MFA, and static keys all work.
Mercek never copies or stores your credentials. Resolved secrets from Secrets Manager or SSM are shown as ARNs in the UI and aren't written to disk.
Activate scopes
A scope is a profile and region together. Mercek reads nothing from an account until you activate a scope for it, so you control what it touches.
Activate as many as you want. Mercek discovers the clusters, services, and tasks across all active scopes and shows them in one tree.
Read-only by default
Browsing, metrics, logs, and the topology map are all reads. None of them change your infrastructure.
Writes are explicit: scaling, forcing a deploy, stopping a task, updating a service, and rolling back. Each one shows a diff of what will change and waits for you to confirm.
Connecting an agent
The agent panel uses the Agent Client Protocol, so you can connect a coding agent such as Claude Code. The agent is read-only to AWS. It can read your ECS state and open screens in the app, but it can't change anything.
When the agent suggests a change, Mercek opens the same diff dialog you'd use by hand, with the matching AWS CLI command beside it. You decide whether to apply it.