Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. D2iQ Mesosphere

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.

Incentivized

Mesosphere is well suited for orchestrating workloads. It supports Docker as a container as well as support others. It is highly suitable for running resilient and auto recovering big data/application containers. Mesosphere has proven time and again to be production ready at a massive scale. It supports native single button/API call scale up and scale down and supports various deployment patterns like Blue-Green and others.

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

• Deploying mesosphere and friends (e.g. marathon)
• Deploying applications (e.g. Cassandra, Jenkins, Spark) on to mesosphere
• Providing value add components such as velocity, and marathon-lb

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Setting up is a bit of a hassle, especially ZooKeeper state management and mesos and marathon quorum.
• Occasionally, I observed some failures when deploying something onto Marathon. Logging or detailed error reporting can help.
• Stale containers and inconsistent states resultant of the cluster failure are hard to solve and need a complete system restart to get it back to normal state.

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

I happen to like mesosphere because it integrates well with a Jenkins based workflow, Deis is a little more Heroku like and it's not clear how to fit that model into a continuous-integration process. Kubernetes has also been criticized for being complicated.

Incentivized

• Easy to manage as it has an orchestrator to manage the containers.
• Less costs and more flexibility with Fargate.
• Negative (tied to AWS, so could not easily integrate other tools like running a Redis cluster. Still, it works but not easily like Kubernetes.

• I see mesosphere as having a positive impact overall on the industry trending Docker and containers in general.
• Seeing how mesosphere helps and simplifies things for the developer and ops, it is definitely a game changer.
• Native support of on demand scaling up and down as per the need is one of the best features.

Incentivized