Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is well suited where you need the ease of managing the clusters by letting AWS do the stuff for you. Obviously, whenever you want to run the docker based workloads, it is always better to go for either AWS ECS or AWS EKS. If you are interested in staying at AWS only and don't want to be cloud-agnostic, then go for AWS ECS instead of AWS EKS. AWS ECS is cheaper than AWS EKS and also more managed by AWS and better integrated with other AWS services. If you want to run those workloads as serverless, then AWS ECS Fargate is the best option to go with. If you already have a Kubernetes based setup that you want to migrate to AWS, then go for AWS EKS instead of AWS ECS.

Incentivized

I've seen multiple universities that have quite investments in Red Hat enterprise virtualization. They don't want to go with the VMware route due to the expense. So Red Hat OpenShift virtualization is a natural fit for them in that environment. I've also seen a lot of VMware customers that are not able financially to sustain the cost increases with the product. So they're looking for an alternative. And Red Hat OpenShift virtualization fills that need.

Incentivized

• One of the biggest advantages is the flexibility to change underlying EC2 instances. As the traffic or demand increases, we can easily change EC2 instances without any issues.
• Amazon ECS APIs are extremely robust and one can start and stop containers by firing one post request only. So, it is not mandatory to keep the demo solutions up for every time. Just at the time of demo fire the command - make the container up and running - do the demo - down the container with API. A simple portal can control every container which helps non-technical (sales, marketing) to do the demo without keeping the solutions up for the entire time frame.

Incentivized

• One thing is the way how it works with the GitHubs model on an enterprise business, how the hub and spoke topology works. Hub cluster topology works the way how there is a governance model to enforce policies. The R back models, the Red Hat OpenShift virtualization that supports the cube board and developer workspace is one big feature within. So yes, these are all some features I would call out.

Incentivized

• A cleaner container service road map
• It would be. nice to have more AI recommended cluster reductions
• The UX could use some simplification

Incentivized

• So I don't know that this is a specific disadvantage for Red Hat OpenShift. It's a challenge for anything that Kubernetes face is. There's an extremely large learning curve associated with it and once you get to the point where you're comfortable with it, it's really not bad. But beating that learning curve is a challenge. I've done a couple presentations on our implementation of Red Hat OpenShift at various conferences and one of the slides I always have in there is a tweet from years ago that said, "I tried to teach somebody Kubernetes once. Now neither of us knows what it is."

Incentivized

Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members

Incentivized

The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform

Incentivized

Openshift performance is based on the underlying infrastructure, the K8s design, and the applications' design. Cloud-native applications should have resilience baked in and should not depend on infrastructure resilience. Standard stateful apps may still depend on the underlying infrastructure. It depends on the approach.

Incentivized

Support is relatively good, although the documentation sometimes is lacking, as well as outdated in our experience, especially when we initiated the process of using this service. But once we found how to assemble things, we haven't really required support from anyone at AWS, the service works without problems so we haven't had the need to contact support, which speaks well of how ECS is built.

Incentivized

Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com

Incentivized

EKS is a Kubernetes technology and you need to learn Kubernetes and build a cluster before using it. So there's a learning curve here. ECS was easier to implement and simpler to have in our use case. It takes less time to run a workload and make it available.

Our developer community is using Red Hat OpenShift for years and they are familiar and comfortable with the product. Red Hat OpenShift UI makes it easier for new developers to adopt without knowing much of Kubernetes. Our platform team feels it’s easy to mange the cluster and upgrades. Other options has more operation overhead and less friendly to developers not have in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes.

Incentivized

It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.

Incentivized

• We achieved minimum downtime.
• The autoscaling kept the performance of the services great.
• We saved money by running the workloads on AWS ECS in Fargate mode by having different settings for different services to save on the hardware configuration side as well as having scheduled tasks.

Incentivized

• Positive: Reduction in physical and virtual machine footprint
• Negative: Lack of native end to end o11y has caused a great deal of focus from our enterprise monitoring folks
• Positive: OCP has allowed developers to have a quick and easy space to experiment

Incentivized