Yup. You can get pretty dang far with just "the task definition is in cloudformation, so update the image in cloudformation and submit the template". For a bit more complexity, add ALB routing weights in, and the case for CodeDeploy is kind of weak. My statement that ECS needs it was probably overzealous; for most situations it doesn't, and if there's some crazy functionality it does I'm not aware of, you'd probably need something else in k8s as well (e.g. istio).