Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers.
$0
per hour per GB
Amazon EKS
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises, available on AWS or on-premise through Amazon EKS Anywhere.
There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS. You pay for AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments.
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Considered Both Products
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
EKS is like a full-featured Kubernetes on AWS. ECS is a proprietary container orchestration service by AWS. ECS is much simpler to learn & use. It has built-in tight integration with other AWS services as well. Some key considerations: EKS is like Kubernetes; if …
Chose Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
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.
Amazon EKS
No answer on this topic
Features
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon ECS is well suited for the scenarios where you want to deploy a microservice to a cloud and instead of manually specifying instance size, number of instances and then specifying the configurations and connecting it with other cloud services like database service, secret manager service etc., you just want to specify these configurations as a file and using that file, the ECS would deploy the service and keep it healthy. It might be less suited for a scenario when you don't want to stick to AWS specific solution for your microservice deployment. The ECS configuration file is specific to AWS ECS and may not be useful for other cloud providers like Azure etc.
It is well suited when you want to have a Kubernetes cluster in AWS Cloud and want to avoid all the management overhead of maintaining your own cluster in terms of the control plane. EKS seems to be lacking in features when compared with AKS and GKE. Backups, service mesh, and monitoring have a lot of room for improvements.
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.
Another AWS Service - While AWS has a service for just about everything, that is also a negative point. There is no service that does 4 out of 4 things you need. This service does 3 out of 4, another service does the fourth thing you need and another two things that the other service does.
With AWS things in general, it's really hard to remain cloud agnostic. Keep that in mind.
Aside from some ECS-specific terms to learn at first, learning & starting to use ECS is relatively straightforward. AWS docs on the topic are also of high quality, with sound & relevant examples to follow. Troubleshooting container issues is also a breeze thanks to CloudWatch integration & helpful error messages on the AWS console.
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.
I chose Amazon ECS over Amazon EKS and other products because the whole infrastructure was decided to be designed on AWS cloud and Amazon ECS made it easier to make the clusters live in just a few minutes. Amazon ECS has better integration with other AWS services and we don't have to look for plugins to do the things, everything is available and can be configured from the AWS console.
It feels like AWS is behind the EKS race, the only advantage I'm able to see right now is the support of IPv6, however, trying to promote AWS alternatives that are different from the market and more like a vendor locking solutions like ECS/Fargate have kept AWS behind and focusing on the wrong things. EKS needs to really improve its integration with the Kubernetes ecosystem and have an enterprise solution for monitoring, backups, and service mesh.
