Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. GitHub

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

GitHub is an easy to go tool when it comes to Version Controlling, CI/CD workflows, Integration with third party softwares. It's effective for any level of CI/CD implementation you would like to. Also the the cost of product is also very competitive and affordable. As of now GitHub lacks capabilities when it comes to detailed project management in comparison to tools like Jira, but overall its value for money.

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

• Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
• Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
• Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.

• 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

• Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
• Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
• Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
• While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

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

GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.

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

There are a ton of resources and tutorials for GitHub online. The sheer number of people who use GitHub ensures that someone has the exact answer you are looking for. The docs on GitHub itself are very thorough as well. You will often find an official doc along with the hundreds of independent tutorials that answers your question, which is unusual for most online services.

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

While I don't have very much experience with these 2 solutions, they're two of the most popular alternatives to GitHub. Bitbucket is from Atlassian, which may make sense for a team that is already using other Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, as their integration will likely be much tighter. Gitlab on the other hand has a reputation as a very capable GitHub replacement with some features that are not available on GitHub like firewall tools.

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.

• Team collaboration significantly improved as everything is clearly logged and maintained.
• Maintaining a good overview of items will be delivered wrt the roadmap for example.
• Knowledge management and tracking. Over time a lot of tickets, issues and comments are logged. GitHub is a great asset to go back and review why x was y.

Incentivized