What is the optimal way to run a Node API in Docker on Amazon ECS?

All these technologies are new and best practices are still being established, so consider these to be tips from my experience only.

One-process-per-container is more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule. It's fine to run multiple processes in a container when you have a use for it, especially in this case where a master process forks workers. Just use a single container and allow it to fork one process per core, as you've suggested in the question.

On EC2, instance types have a number of vCPUs, which will appear as a core to the OS. For the ECS cluster use an EC2 instance type such as the c3.xlarge with four vCPUs. In ECS this translates to 4096 CPU units. If you want the app to make use of all 4 vCPUs, create a task definition that requires 4096 cpu units.

But if you're doing all this only to stop the app from crashing you could also just use a restart policy to restart the container if it crashes. It appears that restart policies are not yet supported by ECS though.

That seems like a really good pattern. It's similar to what is done with Erlang/OTP, and I don't think anyone would argue that it's one of the most robust systems on the planet. Now the question is how to implement.

I would leverage patterns from Heroku or other similar PaaS systems that have a little bit more maturity. I'm not saying that amazon is the wrong place to do this, but simply that a lot of work has been done with this in other areas that you can translate. For instance, this article has a recipe in it:https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/node-cluster

As far as the relationships between vCPU and Compute Units, it looks like it's just a straight ratio of 1/1024. It is a move toward microcharges based on CPU utilization. They are taking these even farther with the lambda work. They are charging you based on fractions of a second that you utilize.

In the docker world you would run 1 nodejs per docker container but you would run many such containers on each of your ec2 instances. If you use something like fig you can use fig scale <n> to run many redundant containers an an instance. This way you don't have to have to define your nodejs count ahead of time and each of your nodejs processes is isolated from the others.